Google Penguin 2.0 Rolled Out

Webmasters have been watching for Penguin 2.0 to hit the Google search results since Google's Distinguished Engineer Matt Cutts first announced that there would be the next generation of Penguin in March. Cutts officially announced that Penguin 2.0 is rolling out late Wednesday afternoon on "This Week in Google".

"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.

Webmasters first got a hint that the next generation of Penguin was imminent when back on May 10 Cutts said on Twitter, “we do expect to roll out Penguin 2.0 (next generation of Penguin) sometime in the next few weeks though.”

Then in a Google Webmaster Help video, Cutts went 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.

He detailed that the new Penguin was specifically going to target black hat spam, but would be a significantly larger impact on spam than the original Penguin and subsequent Penguin updates have had.

Twitter is full of people commenting on the new Penguin 2.0, and there should be more information in the coming hours and days as webmasters compare SERPs that have been affected and what kinds of spam specifically got targeted by this new update.

Google To Soften The Panda Algorithm

As I covered yesterday, in very brief summary, Google's Matt Cutts told us ten SEO changes coming to Google by the end of this summer. One of those changes is softening the impact of the Panda algorithm for sites that are in the "gray area" or "border" of being impacted by the Panda algorithm.

Matt Cutts, Google's head of search spam, said 5 minutes and 3 seconds into the video that Google is adding additional signals to look for other quality metrics that may lessen the impact of the Panda algorithm for those sites in the gray area. This is with a caveat!

Here is the transcript:

We are looking at Panda and seeing if we can find some additional signals, and we think we've got some to help refine things for sites that are kind of in the border zone, the gray area a little bit, And so if we can soften the affect a little bit, for those sites, that we believe have got some additional signals of quality, that will help sites that were previously affected - to some degree.

The question is, what "degree" will these sites see a benefit in ranking after the Panda algorithm is softened for them? That is the big question.

So I screen captured Matt's facial expression when he said that and see what I mean? Will this have much of an impact or just a very soft impact on those who have been impacted by Panda? I am not sure.

But it will be interesting to follow and see what happens over the next few months.

Matt clearly said the Panda algorithm will be softened for some but the question is, how much so?

How To Recover From Panda And Be Safe From Future Updates

As of date there has been thousands of blog posts totally dedicated to this topic but right now I am going to say that, the methods I am going to tell you (which are already discussed by top blogs) are the ones that if you follow them, you would not have to spend sleepless nights day dreaming about the next Google Panda update. So stick this list somewhere you do your blogging and you will be PANDA SAFE.

1. Separate Away Inferior Quality Website content

Google hates short and low quality Articles. So review each and every content on your blog and separate out all the auto-generated content. Don’t let Google to index and crawl your not so good (inferior quality content) areas of your blog because if it does then it wont spare you even a little bit as low value content will cause the algorithm to get hold of and it will slap you with a heavy penalty which will take you months and years to recover from even if you have majority of the cont as genuine and high quality.

2. Concentrate On Unique Website Content

The Panda is penalizing each and every stealer and duplicator. It has not even spared the famously known and huge content farms like ehow and article base. So try to concentrate on your own expertise and write genuine articles and stop copying and chopping articles from other online resources, because remember THE PANDA is watching every content of your.

3. Focus on being an Authoritative Figure

Google is now trusting and awarding those sites with high serps who have the trust of the readers and an authoritative command over its readers and followers. Trust can be measured by any parameter, the tweets you throw out, the links pointing towards your articles, the comments and how many those are on your articles, you social buzz and your authoritative clout you have on your readers and loyals. Write a post which people would want to bookmark, or share on their social networks and most important of all it should be solving a problem and should not be a mere shallow article on a particular topic. Focus on creating articles with these points as your eligibility criteria and you will definitely be making THE PANDA happy.

4. Always maintain Online advertising Ratio Healthy

Do you fill your site with lots of cheap earning ads. Don’t do that because google sees that as an inferior quality of web page. 3-4 ads to the max are good enough and should not hinder with the overall visual and user experience and page loading speed. Keep the advertisements to the minimum and your reader will always recommend your site to others for having a uncluttered web design and site structure and also be good in the eyes of THE PANDA.

5. Keep your Backlinks Healthy and High Quality

Do you like a filthy and dirty neighborhood? I guess no or is it? but the point I want to put forward is that Google does not haapily agree to a site linked by or getting linked to another inferior quality site so what do they do? GOOGLE PENALIZES THEM FOR HAVING A BAD FRIEND. So guys stop paid link selling service because you are harming yourself and even if you have to do it do it a nofollow and not a dofollow ones. And try to build links naturally and at a steady pace because  something fishy with link building and Google notices an abrupt change in your monthly link building efforts, you are sure to get penalized. Another important factor after backlinking comes your internal linking efforts. By internal linking you make the Google robots very happy because they get to index you site faster and go through your whole site like a breeze and in turn Google will award with high serps as their robots were happy after site inspection.

So after implementing these best practices, comes the waiting and the recovery period which should last from around 2 months to 8 months as per industry experts to attain the traffic levels before THE PANDA penalized you. Keep practicing these methods on a regular basis and on Google analytics of your site, you will definitely reap the fruits of your hardwork.