Earlier this year in April, our good friend Pratik talked about the, then upcoming penguin update. It’s official, Google just released version 2 of Penguin.
The first update literally shook the internet. Webmasters had to re-invent themselves and embrace content marketing. Google is wise and is fully committed to their mission of making the search engines friendly and useful for the user.
Honestly, we’ve had ample time to prepare for this update, as Matt Cutts alluded to it many times. For those who are worried, allow me to soothe you a little bit by saying that it will only affect about 2.5% of the internet.
This update will be more intensive than version 1 of Penguin and is specifically targeting black hat spam. Spammers and black hat SEOs should be worried. If you’ve been focusing on quality content, the user, and haven’t participated in black hat techniques, you ‘need not fear’. 🙂
Cutts official statement:
We started rolling out the next generation of the Penguin webspam algorithm this afternoon (May 22, 2013), and the rollout is now complete. About 2.3% of English-US queries are affected to the degree that a regular user might notice. The change has also finished rolling out for other languages world-wide. The scope of Penguin varies by language, e.g. languages with more webspam will see more impact.
This is the fourth Penguin-related launch Google has done, but because this is an updated algorithm (not just a data refresh), we’ve been referring to this change as Penguin 2.0 internally. For more information on what SEOs should expect in the coming months, see the video that we recently released.
Let us know in your comments below what you think of this update and if you’ve seen the results of it yet. We’d love examples!
