How Will Penguin 2.0 Impact Your Websites

Penguin 2.0 is out and, according to Google, 3.1% of all websites would be impacted. Also, this update would impact oth English and non-English language websites. This is the fourth time that a Penguin update has been released, but this one is a bit different from the previous releases. The last two have been data refreshes. Penguin 2.0 has an updated algorithm, making it a more significant release than the previous two.

Impact on Websites

More webmasters may be impacted by Penguin 2.0 than were impacted by the first release, even though that release was estimated to affect slightly more sites than the newest version, according to Google numbers. All releases of this algorithm are designed to fight sites that are using black hat SEO techniques to get impressive search engine visibility without delivering when it comes to content.

Matt Cutts, who works for Google’s Search Quality team, said that this newest version of Penguin is more “comprehensive” than the prior version of the anti-spam technology on a recent video blog. Advertorials, for instance, will be targeted so that they do not have as much of an impact on search engine positioning as they do now.

Not as Bad as Webmasters Might Think

If you have been putting a lot of time into your search engine optimization, Penguin 2.0 is no reason to panic, according to Cutts. Google is working to help designers whose sites may fall into the grey area between black hat and white hat, provided those sites really do have some value to users.

Google is also trying to address a problem that some users have reported involving the way that domains are crowded in the deeper pages of search results. It’s not uncommon to execute a Google search and, 2 or 3 pages into the results, run into a block of results that all come from the same domain. The technology that Google is deploying is designed to lessen these effects.

Spammy Languages

Google did say that search results in languages that tend to be plagued with spam pages will be more affected by the new version of Penguin than other sites. English-language sites, however, should see little effect, provided that the content that they offer is good enough to meet Google’s standards. Paid links, advertisements that have been increasing search engine ranking and other issues, however, are getting addressed in this update, according to Cutts, and webmasters may see some changes in their positioning if they’ve been relying on such techniques to get good placement.