The second version of the long awaited Penguin algorithm refresh has finally been done! Matt Cutts confirmed it in his personal blog and the most reputable prognosis tools MozCast and SERP metrics showed a great jump in their statistics which is a certain sign that something big is happening at the moment. SEOs and Webmasters are expecting major changes to the search results. Matt confirmed that 2.3% of English queries will be impacted by this penguin update.
Matt also posted details about this on his blog www.mattcutts.com/blog/penguin-2-0-rolled-out-today/. He explained that the update is now complete, which also affected for non-English languages, and said “the scope of Penguin varies by language, e.g. languages with more web spam will see more impact.” This update affected a lot deeper than the previous one because this update is not only a Data Refresh rather this is an algorithmic update. They are referring this update as Penguin 2.0 internally. He also added If there exists spam sites that anyone would like to report after this Penguin, They had made a special spam report form at http://bit.ly/penguinspamreport, to tell them about spam sites you see and they will check it out manually.
Penguin updates done previously –
You can recall the previous dates of penguin update with the effected search results
- Penguin on April 24, 2012 (impacting ~3.1% of queries)
- Penguin 2 on May 26, 2012 (impacting less than 0.1%)
- Penguin 3 on October 5, 2012 (impacting ~0.3% of queries)
- Penguin 4 on May 22, 2013 (impacting 2.3% of queries)
We are calling this penguin update as “Godzilla update” as some of the businessman are nowhere in the search results and it also affected the economy too by this penguin 2.0 version.
Image source: comicvine.com
We are monitoring the project closely, if we get any fluctuation we will let you know. Till then follow the below mentioned DOs and Don’ts if you dont want to get penalised.
DOs (as we experienced from our own tests)
- Disavow is beneficial. Whenever we used it to discard links, the ranks improved
- Link removal is also beneficial. We cleaned links whenever it sounded even a tiny bit fishy. The results were again exciting
- Partial match anchor text. Stop doing exact match if you are still doing it. Learn about the tilde operator and things
- Branding is good. Do your branding as sincerely as you can. Branding will secure your identity online.
- Be very careful to use less than 20% anchor text using the same anchor. Vary your anchors as much as you can. The more diverse they are, the better
What we don’t do
- Don’t do the opposite of the last point mentioned above. More than 20% anchor text using same keywords can pull you down quickly
- Don’t collect links from same site many times. It is time that you get your incoming links evenly distributed.
- Avoid low quality link farm at any cost. These are suicidal in present scenario
If your website was hit by Google penguin 2.0 update, and you want to consult a credible company who can help you to get out of the soup, try none other than Search Eccentric. Our Google penguin recovery service proves that we know our business well and can handle yours equally well.
