The Penguin update was launched in April 2012 followed by two refreshes in the same year in-May and October. The first iteration of Penguin was designed to reduce web spam and also hit websites with unnatural link profiles. It was a part of Google’s strategy to involve merchant strategy. Google’s Distinguished Engineer Matt Cutts had been tweeting about the next-roll out of Penguin that was initially scheduled in March, this year. It was finally rolled out on 22nd May. Penguin 2.0 is a new brand of algorithms. It is designed to delve deeper than the home pages of the websites and will have a bigger impact in certain small areas.
Once the roll-out was complete, Cutts added more details regarding the update in his blog post. It said that it has affected 2.3 percent of English-US queries and it will affect non-English queries too. He wrote “We started rolling out the next generation of the Penguin web spam algorithm this afternoon (May 22, 2013) and the rollout is now complete. About 2.3 % of English-US queries have been 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 web spam will see more impact.”
As this is the fourth Penguin-related update and not a data refresh, the changes will be tracked internally. He put extra focus on how this updated algorithm will function. It will specifically target black hat spam in much higher frequency than previous Penguin updates. While Twitter was full with people commenting on how the new update is altering the SERP space, webmasters are busy finding the exact impact on the effect on SERPs and judging exactly what kind of spam has been targeted by Penguin 2.0
The internet marketing agency Portent also suggested that sites that have been badly hit with this update had too much exact match anchor text and link profiles that appeared unnatural to Google. With this update, Google has increasingly applied stricter standard on manipulative link profiles.
Cutts said that the webmasters, who are highly focused on content quality, won’t feel the heat of this update a lot. But for those are proficient in black hat spams, this update might spell a cast. He believes that this change will make a difference with the quality of the search results, as well as it decrease the amount of spam that is showing up.
