Google Penguin 2.0 is Now Live

Penguin 2.0 was officially rolled out yesterday afternoon as part of an ongoing battle Google has with spam.

In Matt Cutts’ blog, he explained that about 2.3% of English-US queries are going to be affected to the degree that a regular user might notice. The changes have also finished rolling out for other languages world-wide. “The scope of Penguin varies by language, e.g. languages with more webspam will see more impact.”

Here are prior penguin updates from 2012:

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)

In addition to just releasing Penguin 2.0, Google has also actively been giving a call to action to a form they created that allows you to manually submit sites that you believe to be spammy and Google will review them.

This is a great idea, assuming everyone is honest and follows best practices. But, since it allows users to anonymously submit any url, this can lead to abuse by online marketers  in an attempt to hurt competitors.   The next couple of weeks will be interesting to see which sites are hurt by the Penguin update and which ones rise up to the top of the SERPS (search engine results page).

For businesses owners, following best practices is becoming more important than ever. Here is a video of Matt Cutts explaining what to expect from Google this summer:

The video boils down to the golden strategy of doing what’s best for the end user –your customers. Content is still king, but most importantly now is that “trust is queen”. Google’s end goal is to reward sites that provide users quality content; content that is informative, answers their questions, and meets their needs. Google favors websites that provide users with a friendly experience in all aspects of design, speed, content and social sharing.

This means that your site shouldn’t be full of page errors, have incredibly slow load speeds or be incompatible with multiple devices and browsers.  The goal of an SEO agency is to make your website both user and search engine friendly Search engines that care about delivering the right results for its users know that if you are a solid company/organization, that cares about its customers, then your website should reflect that and ultimately your customers will organically display that online by sharing your content, videos, products or services.