Penguin 2.0 (#4) — May 22, 2013
After
months of speculation bordering on hype, the 4th Penguin update (dubbed
"2.0" by Google) arrived with only moderate impact. The exact nature
of the changes were unclear, but some evidence suggested that Penguin 2.0 was
more finely targeted to the page level.
Penguin 4, With Penguin 2.0 Generation Spam-Fighting, Is Now
Live
The fourth release of Google’s spam-fighting
“Penguin Update” is now live. But, Penguin 4 has a twist. It contains Penguin2.0 technology under the hood, which Google says is a new generation of
tech that should better stop spam.
Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s Web spam team,
announced the new Penguin 2.0 update during ThisWeek in Google (Episode #199). He referenced the earlier
video of himself talking about the next generation Penguin update, and said
this is being rolled out “within the next few hours.”
Webmasters and SEOs: expect major changes to the
search results. Matt specifically said that 2.3% of English queries will be
noticeably impacted by this update.
Cutts later posted more details about this roll
out on
his blog. He explained that the launch is now complete, including for
non-English languages, and that “the scope of Penguin varies by language, e.g.
languages with more webspam will see more impact.”
Previous Penguin Updates:
Penguin 4? Penguin 2.0? We name each release of
Penguin in sequential order, so it’s easy to know when one happened. The list
so far:
- Penguin 1 on April 24, 2012 (impacting ~3.1% of queries)
- Penguin 2 on May 26, 2012 (impacting less than 0.1%)
- Penguin 3 on October 5, 2012 (impacting ~0.3% of queries)
- Penguin 4 on May 22, 2013 (impacting 2.3% of queries)
But after the first release, the second and third
still were data refreshes of the same basic Penguin algorithm with only minor
changes. This fourth release is a major change, so big that Google has referred
to it as Penguin 2.0 internally.
