It’s here, it’s here! It’s the day we’ve all been waiting for, but it’s pretty much the polar opposite of Christmas. It’s the day that Google finally delivers their much-hyped Penguin 2.0 update. Who was hit? What does it mean for your search engine optimization SEO?
Lets take a look.
We’ve been looking for the update for awhile, and Matt Cutts formally announced on “This Week in Google” that Wednesday night would be the official rollout. According to Cutts, the update is primarily targeting old-school black hat techniques that have managed to slip through the cracks thus far. With the usual Google specificity, he also said the update would heavily target “certain small areas.”
In his newest blog post, Matt Cutts tells us a little more about the Penguin 2.0 rollout. Apparently, it affects about 2.3 percent of English-U.S. searches, and it also affects an unknown percent of non-English searches.
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.
Stand by for more details on exactly who was hit hard by Penguin 2.0. The webmaster world is buzzing, and as more people report on penalties and ranking drops, we’ll be able to form a comprehensive picture of the damage.