Penguin 2.0 is upon us - May 22, 2013

Here's the reference from Matt Cutts: [mattcutts.com...]

Nothing major for the sites I watch so far.

2 sites that were hit 4/2012 saw an identical bounce in traffic 8pm est.

bummer, my sites seem unaffected. was hoping for some positive bounce

on twit MC said the original version of penguin "essentially only looked at the home page of a site", the new version looks deeper. Unless he misspoke, that's huge! We had inside pages/directories that we assumed were affected by penguin.

@Shepherd WOW just WOW!
I was sure penguin affected the whole site. I guess that may go a little into explaining why you would see deeper pages ranking where the home page used to?

on twit MC said the original version of penguin "essentially only looked at the home page of a site",

@Shepherd - can you provide a reference / link. I haven't heard of that.

Terms supported by exact match anchor text from IBL's seem to have been hit on previously unaffected terms, which were more lightly linked. From my perspective it looks like a lowering of the tolerance threshold. Brands seem unaffected again.

Still early days for analysis.

essentially only looked at the home page of a site

[twit.tv...]

@1:21:50 in the video

One notices this if one has some single page sites..

So ..yes it appears to have rolled ..

Sites / pages that were at #3 move to #2 or #1 :)

Sites that were at #1 stayed at #1 :) ..those below them moved around..

Happened ..20/21/22 ..May..may well continue..But usually when Matt says "rolling" or "will roll"..the rolling has already happened..just minor settling remains..in the grand tradition of G FUD..

[edited by: Leosghost at 2:10 am (utc) on May 23, 2013]

Ok, I am now seeing some flux in the results. Not terrible or anything but definitely some movement in keywords I track. Early days though. Amazing what an hour or so can do while a roll out is happening.

One client is hit hard...his major 2 term keywords are gone...but many long tail and 3 word terms are about the same or dropped just few positions...one thing I know is that 4 of his major keywords that lost rankings were over optimized with too many exact anchor text links. Many other clients I have checked so far, have not been affected. I think should be easy to bring them back. From what Google said Penguin is a real time algo now, so we don't have to wait for next update to see results.

Nothing going on for me. Oh well.

on twit MC said the original version of penguin "essentially only looked at the home page of a site", the new version looks deeper. Unless he misspoke, that's huge! We had inside pages/directories that we assumed were affected by penguin

Matt Cutts "It's gonna have a pretty big impact on web spam," Cutts said on the show. "It's a brand new generation of algorithms. The previous iteration of Penguin would essentinally only look at the home page of a site. The newer generation of Penguin goes much deeper and has a really big impact in certain small areas." [searchenginewatch.com...]
This statement wasn't accidental. This is key / huge .... needs good commentary inputs to flesh out the substance more.

Are we looking at a more granular approach by Google rather than a site-wide demotion?

I've not heard any reaction over the last year to this ... so it must have been missed by expert analysis.

[edited by: Whitey at 2:32 am (utc) on May 23, 2013]

From what Google said Penguin is a real time algo now, so we don't have to wait for next update to see results

Where did they say this?

Just looking at the homepage in Penguin 1.x would still affect the whole site since that is the root of the site (usually) and where the most page rank flows from.

From what Google said Penguin is a real time algo now, so we don't have to wait for next update to see results

Where did they say this?

Yes, please give a reference. From everything I've read Penguin is not real-time integrated. Even Panda's real time integration is very new, and Penguin is a much newer algorithm than Panda is.

[edited by: tedster at 2:51 am (utc) on May 23, 2013]

From what Google said Penguin is a real time algo now, so we don't have to wait for next update to see results

Where did they say this?

Hmmm...I was just looking to find where I saw that but no luck...maybe that was regarding panda...maybe someone else can confirm this.

Thanks for helping us clarify this, submitx.

The Panda integration announcement came this March from Matt Cutts - at the SMX conference. [searchengineland.com...]

The #1 link buyer in our vertical appears to have been dinged along with some others. They've really mixed up some others too. If these results tonight are the near end result maybe bravo MC and goog

This would be the first time I've ever seen those sites take a hit.

I agree with others that have said this started to roll over the weekend in the Far East and has spread over the few days and completed tonight. I still see some host crowding but I'm sure they will change that.

Assuming this more granular approach will filter into Panda also, imagine if Panda only looked at the homepage too O_o

Matt Cutts said in the video that was referred to earlier that as soon as he was done with the interview, they were going to push the red button. At 10 minutes after 4pm mountain time, 3:10 pacific I saw the jolting and shaking. It lasted an hour then things leveled off for me and not a huge effect. We shall see how long it takes the serps to stop the flux.

Thanks for helping us clarify this, submitx.

The Panda integration announcement came this March from Matt Cutts - at the SMX conference. [searchengineland.com...]

Ted, that must be it...I got it confused with Panda probably. But I just hope Google will release Penguin more often than what they have been doing.

On a related note, anyone out there that has used the DISSAVOW tool, please report if you are seeing improvements or recovery.

Some losses for me - not massive, but a few places down on a number of keywords on a number of sites. No links built at all since April 2012 so I'm guessing it's not so much a penalty but Google deeming other sites "better". Having said that, a number of these keywords that I lost on still have Amazon and eBay clusters above them - remove those clusters and I'll be ranking top-5 and better than I was pre-Penguin 2.0 (if that makese sense). Noticing some strange and irrelevant results too.

I'm still seeing a lot of moving around - I think this is far from over

anyone out there that has used the DISSAVOW tool

It has had no effect whatsoever in my case.

Still lots of clusters in searches I am making. Sorting that issue out will help both searchers and independent site owners, AND Google. Google resembles an Amazon / eBay Custom Search on a LOT of buying searches.

wow my ranking improved :-)

Didn't see any Penguin 1.0 recoveries despite link removals. I figured that would probably be the case. Not so reliant in Google in the last 12 months so not so impacting on me anyway. Penguin doesn't affect any of my other traffic sources :)

Hmm things are settling down now a little and surprise surprise it looks like the brands are the big winners. I guess we will really know in a day or so.

We had a boost in the us version with a 2 words query, were we were not well, however was I thought was wierd, was that that 2 wordquery like "widget city" on the first page before us were a page with url. facebook/widget-city/