Matt Cutts with Google put out a new video regarding Penguin 2.0. Technically this is Penguin 4, but Matt and his team are going with 2.0 as this is a major upgrade to the algorithm  The changes being made will mostly affect black hat SEO marketers, marketers that try to buy their way into search results, trick the system or cheat. He touched on 10 items that will be happening over the next few months and during the Summer of 2013 that these people will not like.

White Hat Marketers and small business wins with Penguin 2.0

This is a valuable update for small and medium size business owners who work hard to build a great compelling content and web sites. If that’s what you’re doing, Matt and his team are working hard to share your content with the world. While these Penguin 2.0 changes will help small – medium sized businesses, they will make it harder, or less likely, that web masters will find it difficult to rise up through the rankings when they try to buy their way into SEO, use Black Hat techniques or attempt Link Spamming. These are the main points of Penguin 2.0:

1. We’re going deeper that Penguin 1.0. Penguin 2.0 is according to Matt, “…a web-spam change that’s…dedicated to try to find…Black Hat webspam and to try to target and address that. This change will have more of an impact than 1.0
2. Advertorial that violate quality guidelines is going to have a very rough road ahead. Paid ads will no longer float pagerank  Matt explains that there’s nothing wrong with Advertorials in Google’s eyes, but they should not float page ranking in the SERPS and the ad should fully disclose that the content is paid and not editorial. I suspect that we will hear a great rumbling from those who sell advertising space online from this change alone
3. Traditional queries will be see cleaner SERPs while traditionally spammy SERP areas will receive even tighter filtering. Matt specifically brings up pornograhpic queries and payday loan search results where Penguin 2.0 will have a much stronger impact

   

4. Denying value to link spammers by “going upstream”.   This will negatively affect black hat practices like link networks even more than what has been done historically
5. Matt’s team is “munging” around on some ideas to enhance the sophistication of link analysis. The data they’re working with will potentially bear fruit for the team. It’s pretty early to discuss the details and we’re excited to see where this goes
6. Improve the ability to detect hacked sites and enhance the way site owners communicate with Google when the site is reclaimed. Potentially the best part is that there will now be a single point of contact and a single source point of information for site owners to bring their website back up the SERP results
7. Author Authority is going to have a huge boost this summer.  The Google team is working hard to use a few new signals to better determine if an author is an authority in their sphere of influence and if so, to give them more float
8. The Google team has found and is adding some signals of quality to algorithm. This will positively affect the quality of  results and “soften the blow” for legitimate sites who were impacted too severely by the first version of Panda
9. The team is reviewing a change that will limit clusters of results showing from the same domain.  So as you’ve reviewed results, once you’ve seen a set from a domain, and if there’s a cluster from that domain further down in the SERPS, those additional results will be ignored to allow other results to float up. The purpose is to increase the diversity of the results page
10. Give more information to Webmasters. Beyond information about hacked sites as mentioned in point 6, Google is moving their resources around in order to give more concrete details and more useful URLs for diagnosing issues

My favorite line from the video is when Matt Cutts says, “If you’ve been hanging out on a lot of black hat forums and trading…different types of spamming package tips and that sort of stuff, then this may be a more eventful Summer for you!” Just goes to show that the anti-spam team is very serious about delivering quality results. Without it, Bing wouldn’t have to work as hard to gain market share.

As a team, Real Big Marketing is excited for these changes and the improvements it will provide to small and medium size businesses in Jackson, Lansing and the surrounding area. If you’re staying on top of your content, making sure it’s fresh and relevant, this shouldn’t be a problem for you and we hope that you have an “uneventful” Summer 2013.

If you’re interested in watching the video, we’ve embedded it here for you to view: