Penguin has landed
Long awaited next gen of Penguin, the webspam algorithm, was unleashed on the net yesterday, ten day after the initial announcement in a recent video on Matt Cutts’ blog . According to Cutts, Google’s Distinguished Engineer & Spam Fighter Extraordinaire, roughly 2.0% of queries [were] affected in the update.
2.0% of queries [were] affected to a degree that a regular use might notice.
The Google Penguin 2.0 update was not just a data refresh (when data is refreshed in the existing algorithm, like index update), but an algorithm update. First launched in April 2012, Penguin was designed to limit the impact of spam techniques (such as link buying), on Google search results, and affected over 3% of queries, which is considerably less than the notorious Panda. However, Penguin 1.0 affected many of the “money terms” – keywords with high visibility & traffic.
I probably was not the only one checking the indices yesterday – the few industries that I track did not show much movement (uff!). But I had a real treat this morning, when I noticed that Searchmetrics updated their weekly winners & losers stats early – thanks guys, you know how to make an SEO happy!
Penguin 2.0 Results – Biggest Losers (Australia)
Searchmetrics: Penguin 2.0 – Biggest Losers
I’ve asked Mark Baartse, Consulting Director @ First: for a comment:
“Some not surprising entries: Shopping comparison engines are always ripe for algo updates, and myshopping.com.au have been hit this time. I know they do very aggressive link building so perhaps their tactics left something to be desired.
In a similar space, travel aggregators have often been on the razor edge of algo updates, so cheapflights.com.au and iwantthatflight.com.au aren’t a surprise.
Paypal.com – that that drop is a mystery. I’d be surprised if they are doing any dubious SEO activities.
Few sites on the list seem to be more of a “noise”, or drops unrelated to SEO activities. It would seem odd for passport.net to be hit by the Penguin update, although their drop is massive. I find that curious. “Nsw.edu.au” is a small hit and is most likely just reporting noise – perhaps some pages removed?
Thepiratebay.org is presumably because they just changed domain.
Penguin 2.0 Results – The Winners (Australia)
And Now To You
We will continue to check the results, but I think we need to wait till the dust settles to see some really meaningful results. What do you think of the results? Have you noticed big movements in your site’s visibility? Leave a comment or drop me line on Twitter @wioletakawecka.