The latest Google algorithm update, referred to as “Penguin 2.0” by Matt Cutts (head of Google’s Search Quality team), was rolled out last week and is targeted at webspam. Penguin 2.0 will likely affect you if your website violates Google’s “quality guidelines”. If you are not familiar with Google’s Quality Guidelines – basic principles, techniques, and ‘good practices’ that help Google find, crawl, and index your site – you should be. It is by no means a comprehensive list, but there are a few basic principles and specific guidelines that when followed, will increase your chances of ranking higher in Google’s search engine result pages (SERPs), and staying off the search engine’s “naughty list”.
This is the fourth Penguin-related launch from Google, but because it’s an update to the algorithm (and not just a data refresh), it’s being referred to as Penguin 2.0. As expected, Google hasn’t provided much detail with regards to what has been changed with this latest algorithm update, but if you’ve seen your traffic plummet after May 22nd 2013, its likely because of Penguin 2.0.
Aside from Penguin 2.0, there are a few Webmaster Tools updates that are being talked about and we may possibly see some of them rolled out in the near future. One in particular that could prove useful is a new area in Webmaster Tools that will be aimed at providing a “single spot” for webmasters, which will allow them to diagnose and resolve problems that are occurring on their websites.If you want to know more, watch the video below to hear about it right from the source. Google’s Matt Cutts vaguely hints that they are in the early days of working on a completely different system that does more sophisticated link analysis. It will be interesting to see what will come of that and how it will affect rankings in the weeks and months ahead.
