Penguin 2.0 is upon us - May 22, 2013

[viral]

Matt has announced Penguin 2.0 (Penguin 4). Either way it is out there and affecting.

Is anyone noticing much movement in the serps? I personally haven't seen much flux but Mozcast seems to be feeling something.

[mattcutts.com...]

We started rolling out the next generation of the Penguin webspam algorithm this afternoon (May 22, 2013), and the rollout is now complete. About 2.3% of English-US queries are affected to the degree that a regular user might notice. The change has 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.

This is the fourth Penguin-related launch Google has done, but because this is an updated algorithm (not just a data refresh), we’ve been referring to this change as Penguin 2.0 internally. For more information on what SEOs should expect in the coming months, see the video that we recently released.

[edited by: Brett_Tabke at 12:12 pm (utc) on May 23, 2013]
[edit reason] added quote [/edit]

[muzza64]

I'd just like to congratulate the SEO company that just emailed me this:-

Google Penguin Update 2.0 - Have you been affected?

The 'Penguin' update looks at the links that point to your website, their quality and their authority. Poor quality, 'spammy' links are being heavily penalised.

The quality of the links that are being built to a website isn't something that many people pay attention to, but this 'Penguin' update, and the first version that was released last year, can have such a significant impact on a website's rank that you might as well not be in the search engines at all.

If you're looking at your web traffic and wondering why, all of a sudden your website seems to be a quiet, "Penguin" could be the reason and if that's the case, you need to act quickly. The XXX (name removed) SEO team successfully supported a number of businesses who were affected by the first release of 'Penguin' and if you've been a victim of this release, we can help you too.

So, that's that solved then. Better give them a ring. There I was thinking Penguin was baffling the experts but, no, this company have nailed what this update is about in 24 hours.

We can all stop speculating now. Phew!

[Wilburforce]

So, that's that solved then. Better give them a ring.

Excellent news! I was worried for a moment there.

[SEchecker]

@ whitey

No m8 there is a misunderstanding!

I mentioned “3k sites indexed” not we do operate 3k websites...

Why I mentioned the "3k sites index" is cuz penguin 2.0 is looking deeper in to a domain, not only at the homepage. E.g. The former penguins did mainly penalize the homepage now, penguin 2.0 will check all the sites on a domain...

[n00b1]

You mean pages, not sites then surely?

[SEchecker]

y pages

[netmeg]

Heh, some of them must have not gotten the memo though; just this morning I got an email from someone offering to pay a few hundred bucks for a footer link on my PR5 site. Uh, yea, right.

[Leosghost]

Heh, some of them must have not gotten the memo though; just this morning I got an email from someone offering to pay a few hundred bucks for a footer link on my PR5 site. Uh, yea, right.

Suggest that they contact one of your competitors,( you can tell them the one that suits you best ) as you are too busy/maxed out/about to go out the door on vacation...:) Maybe the competitor hasn't got the memo too ..and will bite :)

[netmeg]

It's just my personal site, no competitors. I wouldn't turn these guys on to a dog I didn't like.

[Dymero]

I was expecting a bloodbath in our niche, but nothing much, so it's likely that many of the sites that will be hit were hit in a previous version of Penguin before I started doing significant tracking of competitors. A couple sites that were ranking prominently for some terms no longer are, though.

As for us, we've seen positive ranking improvement overall.

[Garya]

My niche is real estate. I notice that the brand name sites that removed all their keyword links ( xxxx real estate )
Are doing great.

Sites with a few keyword links for the page where demoted. I had one site that was always 1st page up until penguin 2.0.

The homepage has many old links from 2002 which has always helped
but now #1 on Bing and 5th page on google now.

What to do now, remove 300 or so old links with keywords or build another site for google.

[sandboxsam]

Hi Garya, I assume the links removed ( xxxx real estate ) were on other websites and not internal?

[Garya]

sandboxsam
Yes on other websites

[mike2010]

30% improvement in google keyword traffic...the last 2 days...on one of our high content / frequent update sites ! (mostly secondary pages)

I'm pleased so far.

[submitx]

one thing I know is that 4 of his major keywords that lost rankings were over optimized with too many exact anchor text links.

Is the home page the page ranking for these keywords?

It was a mix, some were home pages, some internal pages.

[submitx]

It seems the dust is not settled yet...I have seen many fluctuations for some terms I checked throughout the day today!

Also my client is seeing different results from a different city. One thing we noticed is a new kind of geo targetting, which targets keywords in the URL path! I had not seen this before, but it may be totally unrelated to Penguin...From Burbank, CA, I am seeing my client's internal pages that has the words "burbank" or "los angeles" in the URL rank here locally, but my client is seeing totally different pages in San Diego rank around the same positions!

[Whitey]

Google Penguin 2.0 Goes Deep. But What Does That Mean?

The thing is, some misconceptions about Penguin 2.0 are driving me absolutely crazy.

Matt Cutts, in his video about this update, talks about how Penguin 2.0 will be "more comprehensive," how this version "goes deeper" and will result in "more of an impact" than Penguin 1.0.

The SEO community is translating "goes deeper" to mean that Penguin 1.0 only impacted the home page of a web site.

... The WebmasterWorld thread has webmasters confused about it also, where someone said "I don't understand this idea that Penguin 1.0 just looked at the home page.

Update: I see now where the confusion comes from, via TWIG, right over here [youtube.com...] where Matt said Penguin looks at the home page of the site
[seroundtable.com...]
@rustybrick - not sure what this means either, but it sure is frustrating. Wish it could be fleshed out more.

[scottsonline]

Traffic really didn't change much for us. What did change on the whole:

Pages per google visit have doubled
Conversion % has more than doubled
Bing traffic has risen by 300% but no change in conversion. % it is simply more people trying it

The bing traffic is still small but up over 20-25% most days of organic.

There is definitely a fixation of moving people in a page. Google is targeting category pages which is a good idea.

[Chris13]

I saw most of my changes two weeks ago, not this week. I saw large brands be handed the top spots, including multiple pages, while I dropped down to below them. Was consistently ranking 1 or 2 in cities where I operate. Now I sit lower, but things leveled off two weeks ago. Today was a little down but I attribute that to the long weekend we're heading into, being that today is Friday.

Next Tuesday will tell me more, I believe.

[diberry]

I saw most of my changes two weeks ago, not this week. I saw large brands be handed the top spots, including multiple pages, while I dropped down to below them.

Was this around the 9th? Because my Penguinized/Pandalyzed site had a significant partial recovery at that point - I do think something happened around that time.

[ColourOfSpring]

I'm seeing some of my keywords slip further. Why? Because of even-worse "host crowding" (clusters) of Amazon results. I'm talking about some long-ish tail keywords here. First page is 100% (without exception) taken up by both Amazon and eBay results - normally 6 or 7 Amazon, 3 or 4 eBay - for most of these keywords. If Matt Cutts was true to his word and Google are working on the host crowding problem, why is this happening? These SERPs are resembling a Custom Search Engine for Amazon and eBay.

[JesterMagic]

Well it has been 3 days since Penguin 2.0 and I would have to say it is a fail. For the most part I still see About and Youtube for all the money keywords along with the same low quality websites with about half doing some blackhat techniques (that are easy to spot if you spend 5 minutes to analyze the site). Only 1 of my good competitors of about a year ago is left on the first page.

P2 effected 2% of search but it wasn't like P1 where sites just disappeared. For the most part I see sites either gaining a few places or lost a few places in rankings. I haven't seen P2 really fix any of P1's problems and we have seen only a few people who say they say any large improvements in there traffic.

Obviously Google thinks P1 works since not much change happened with P2 and that is sad.

[diberry]

What I'm seeing on all my queries is that the recognizable brands are all at the top, and THEN you get to the independent sites and blogs. It's as if there are two separate SERPs, and if you're #1 for the independent sites, you'll still rank below the brands. Where I'm seeing this, there is NO mixing of the two - the brands stop at some point, and the indies begin.

The only exceptions are the lower volume keyphrases. On those, independent websites can rank amongst the brands, even over them.

Is anyone else seeing a distinct pattern of higher volume keyphrases being reserved for brands first, almost like two entirely separate SERPs for "brands" and "indies"?

[1script]

Do we know for a fact that Penguin 2.0 has been completed? There has been more advance notice this time and MC said it's going to rock our world and then all of a sudden, one perfect late May afternoon - "we just did it this afternoon". Really? An earth shattering update done in few hours? Something does not add up here.

And yes, I see absolutely no difference in traffic since May 22nd (roughly accounting for the usual Memorial Day reduction) after having done a lot to my links, including multiple disavow submissions.

One other thing: MC says "we had 4 Penguin 1.0 runs" but "this time is different so we call it Penguin 2.0" (I paraphrase). This took my by surprise, I though Penguin 1.0 was only run once in April 2012. Do you guys know the dates of the 4 runs he's referring to?

[Chris13]

Was this around the 9th? Because my Penguinized/Pandalyzed site had a significant partial recovery at that point - I do think something happened around that time. - diberry

Pretty much. The 8th was the first day I noticed that something was up. I still see clustered results from the top brands and I'm hoping those will fall away. If they don't then the top brands can monopolize the top 3 pages of the SERP let alone the top page.

[Just double checked the date. The change showed on the SERP on the 9th. The 8th was only down a tiny bit, not outside usual traffic fluxuations. So your date of the 9th seems spot on.]

[edited by: Chris13 at 5:11 pm (utc) on May 25, 2013]

[SEchecker]

Well I do see a difference: minus 50% traffic and I duno why...prolly we supposed to be black- hatters, spammers and link networkers.. but that’s crap we are a legit site what got hit on first penguin cuz of our lousy SEO consultants what made blog, forum comments and added our sites in low quality directories... we fixed all links we could on our own, sent reconsideration requests, used disavow tool played by rules since 1st penguin and now BOOOOM - 50% no clue why...

[mike2010]

They didn't do much (if anything) to fix adult site host crowding. Still the big dogs own like 95% of adult search inquiries. (p0rnhub, Youp0rn , Tube8, Xtube , etc)

[tedster]

One other thing: MC says "we had 4 Penguin 1.0 runs" but "this time is different so we call it Penguin 2.0" (I paraphrase). This took my by surprise, I though Penguin 1.0 was only run once in April 2012. Do you guys know the dates of the 4 runs he's referring to?

That sentence is a bit ambiguous, 1script. There were only three "other" runs and this one makes four total. Here are the dates, and they're linked to our discussions of each Penguin update:

Apr 24, 2012 [webmasterworld.com]
May 26, 2012 [webmasterworld.com]
Oct 05, 2012 [webmasterworld.com]
May 22, 2013 [webmasterworld.com] (this thread)

We keep a record of significant Google updates and links to our discussions about them here:
Monthly Reference - Google Updates and SERP Changes [webmasterworld.com]

[1script]

@tedster: Thanks, tedster, that's exactly what I was looking for! Interestingly, I see an uptick in G traffic after every Penguin run and yet each time I loose more traffic gradually until the next update. How would you interpret this pattern? Links - OK (hence Penguin uptick); everything else - not so much?

[tedster]

Maybe there are other parts of the total algorithm that kick in and start to modify what Penguin gave you. I'm thinking particularly about whatever they do to generate statistical sampling - the same thing that generates those multiple positions we can see in Webmaster Tools. If your rankings don't get their predicted CTR from the SERPd, then more people start not to see the same rankings for you than you expect.

[taberstruths]

1script some SEO's, I can't remember where I have read it, but they have said that what you are experiencing is part of the Panda algo. They content that serp CTR, bounce rate, time on page, and other user metrics is what is causing this.