Google has made a major update to its Penguin search algorithm this week, as the internet giant looks to improve its search results by eliminating web spam.
The new ‘Penguin 2.0’ update aims to tackle bad link-building and linking practices, penalising sites that use unsavory techniques to help improve visibility within the SERPs.
The move will see Google specifically target black hat spam, and will have a significantly larger impact on spam than previous versions of Penguin have had the company claimed.
Using the new algorithm to crawl the web looking for links, Google’s team will evaluate a huge amount of data to learn more about “bad” – or non-organic – links, combing through the mountains of data on the Internet to locate the spots where bad links live.
Once Google locates these suspicious links, it will devalue them and remove their PageRank, thus negating whatever positive impact they had on search results.
The links that stand out to Google as bad either come from locations on the Internet that Google deems untrustworthy or in places with high “link velocity” – the rate at which a site acquires inbound links.
‘Brand new generation of algorithms’
Google’s lead engineer Matt Cutts first announced that there would be the next generation of Penguin in March.
Cutts officially announced that Penguin 2.0 rolled out late Wednesday afternoon on “This Week in Google”.
Watch the show below:
“It’s gonna have a pretty big impact on web spam,” Cutts said on the show. “It’s a brand new generation of algorithms. The previous iteration of Penguin would essentinally only look at the home page of a site. The newer generation of Penguin goes much deeper and has a really big impact in certain small areas.”
In a new blog post, Cutts added more details on Penguin 2.0, saying that the rollout is now complete and affects 2.3 percent of English-U.S. queries, and that it affects non-English queries as well.
Cutts wrote: 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.
In a Google Webmaster Help video (see below), Cutts goes into more detail on what Penguin 2.0 would bring, along with what new changes webmasters can expect over the coming months with regards to Google search results.
The move further signals and end to the ‘wild west ‘days of search engine optimization (SEO) , as Google values websites that provide relevant information about in-demand topics and provide added value for Internet users.
Conversely, search engines punish sites that chase after large numbers of links with little regard for quality or context.
Read Matt Cutt’s blog here
