SEO Companies be aware and buckle up if you have been spamming Google. There are more changes to come from the “Penguin Update” in the coming months. As Google continues to add and modify the penguin update websites are going to continue to be affected.
Matt Cutt’s spoke about Google still adjusting the Penguin update at the SES San Francisco conference. As Matt and Google likes to put it, the Penguin isn’t a penalty rather a slight adjustment that simply doesn’t allow sites to get rewarded for spam as much as in the prior years. Linking strategies that showed success in the past has been discredited.
Minor Changes
Last year Google rolled out its Panda update which was designed to penalize pages that had poor quality content. Each minor SEO update after that produced changes in the search results. The results affected a wide variety of users. Now we are at the point where Panda’s being updated on a monthly basis according to Matt, and the changes are going to be very subtle.
As recently as late July, Google released Panda 3.9 and it looks like we are going to be experiencing a Apple type announcement where they released the IPhone 4GS vs. the IPhone 5. According to Google Pandas new update is going to be more like Panda 3.91 vs. Panda 4.0.
Back To Penguin
Penguin SEO update is simply different than the Panda SEO update. While many don’t know the difference Matt Cutts stated that since the algorithm is newer, it will face bigger adjustments and thus be more “jolting” for users that it hits, until it can master it down to simply release smoother rollouts. Matt said verbatim:
I was giving context on the fact that lots of people were asking me when the next Penguin update would happen, as if they expected Penguin updates to happen on a monthly basis and as if Penguin would only involve data refreshes.
If you remember, in the early days of Panda, it took several months for us to iterate on the algorithm, and the Panda impact tended to be somewhat larger (e.g. the April 2011 update incorporated new signals like sites that users block). Later on, the Panda updates had less impact over time as we stabilized the signals/algorithm and Panda moved closer to near-monthly updates.
Likewise, we’re still in the early stages of Penguin where the engineers are incorporating new signals and iterating to improve the algorithm. Because of that, expect that the next few Penguin updates will take longer, incorporate additional signals, and as a result will have more noticeable impact. It’s not the case that people should just expect data refreshes for Penguin quite yet.
As of today Google has only announced one further change to the Penguin update. That was released last May, right before the Penguin Update. It was a relatively small impact only affecting 0.1% of all search results.
As for a new update, it seems like it is in the works. Matt Cutts said it seems likely to be a major revision when it is released. While there are always losers in the process of a Google update, but like with any change there are always ones that proper.