Penguin 2.0: What you need to know!

Author: Dinesh Dhiman

After months of mini updates and several weeks of waiting, Penguin 2.0 has finally arrived. The announcement has been made by none other than Matt Cutts, a distinguished engineer at Google.

Cutts made the announcement on May 22, but divulged little details. Since not much has emerged out of Google Headquarters, speculations are rife over what could be the implications of the latest update to Google algorithms.

While making the announcement, Cutts wrote on his blog, ‘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 Penguin 2.0 update is aimed at targeting web spam, which essentially means that webmasters engaging in dubious link building techniques are likely to face heat.

In fact, webmasters have dreaded and derided any changes in the Google search algorithm ever since the Panda and Penguin updates turned the web on its head. Has your site experienced massive drop in traffic in the last few days? Well, your site could be the victim of Penguin 2.0 update. Here is what you need to know.

Folks out there at Google want you to not engage in Black Hat SEO techniques to build links. They want you to create content that users find worth sharing. Besides that, they despise link spamming, so you should not engage in that either. Link value, link velocity, link relevancy and anchor text are some of the primary considerations this time.

Link Value

Links generated from ‘bad neighborhoods’ are not going to do any good to your site. You ought to get backlinks from reputable sites, preferably related to the type of content you are generating. Links from trusted sites should keep your site protected from future updates as well. Getting backlinks from sites with PR 4 or higher is a great idea, though you need to check how useful content on the site is.

Link Speed

From now on, Google is going to keep an eye on the speed with which you are generating links. For instance, if you have been building tons of links every single day, chances are you are going to find yourself in bad books of Google. At the best, you can expect Google not to consider more than 75 backlinks on a given day. It is a better idea to build great quality links gradually. However, genuinely viral content will be spared the spank.

Link Relevancy

Links from irrelevant sites are going to cost webmasters dearly from now on. Hence, you must take care to obtain links from relevant sites only lest you want to get your site penalized by Google. Your site can suffer a decrease in ranking in case you are collecting tons of links from sites that have nothing to do with your site.

Anchor Text

Direct relation between web spam and exact match anchor text has been established. Future Google updates are going to tighten the noose, so keeping the practice under minimum is a great idea. In case your site has excessive links with same keywords in the anchor text, it is the time for some clean-up.

It seems a change in strategy is in the stores for most webmasters. Google doesn’t like being taken for a ride and it is high time that promoters think twice before spamming links to gain rankings.