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Tuesday, March 12, 2013

Matt Cutts announced Google's new Penguin, Panda & Link Networks Updates

Matt Cutts, Google's head of search spam, announced Google's upcoming Penguin, Panda algorithms updates and new link network targets in 2013. He informed about it during The Search Police, SEO Track of the SMX West.

Panda Update Coming on this Friday or Monday
Matt revealed that a Panda Algorithm update will be released anytime from this coming Friday (15 March 2013) till Monday (18 March 2013). The last version was Panda Update 24, out on 22 January 2013. So the new Panda Update 25 is set to come after 8 weeks approximately.

Major Penguin Update in 2013
Matt Cutts also said that there will be a significant Penguin update in 2013. Google's search quality team is working on a large update to the Penguin algorithm. He thinks that it will be one of the more talked about Google algorithm updates of the year.

Penguin Update 1 was released on 24 April 2012 with 3.1% impact. Penguin Update 2 was out on 26 May 2012 with less than 0.1% effect. Penguin Update 3 came on 5 October 2012 with 0.3% change.

Link Network axing Confirmed
Matt Cutts confirmed that Google targeted a Link Network a couple weeks ago. Matt emaphasied that the Search Engine giant will go after more in 2013. He revealed that Google will release another update in the next week or two, that will specifically target another big link network.

Google penalized Russian Backlinks Network in first week of March 2013. Although the Big G did not reveal the name of the affectee, but it was rumored in Webmaster forums to be Russian based SAPE Links.

Reference(s):
Search Engine Land - http://searchengineland.com/googles-matt-cutts-on-upcoming-penguin-panda-link-networks-updates-151273
Search Engine Roundtable - http://www.seroundtable.com/google-penguin-four-16486.html

Thursday, March 7, 2013

Did Google penalize SAPE Links (another Link Network)?

Rumor floating around the SEO industry currently is that Google has crushed yet another link network, SAPE Links. Those using this paid service were supposedly penalized and downgraded in Google rankings over last two days. But not all webmasters agree it is the SAPE link network, rather they feel it may be a different network all together.


Dozens of threads are discussing about downgrades of Google rankings recently. Black Hat World and Black Hat Group have webmasters and SEOs who are hinting that it was due to SAPE Links. While others are not sure whether it is specific to SAPE or some other link network.

One webmaster wrote:
Anyone that use SAPE links see huge drop in rankings today?
Quite a number of Search professionals agreed but not all.

Google's head of search spam, Matt Cutts tweeted on 13 February 2013 that he was investigating "naughty Russian link selling software". And coincidently SAPE Links is a Russian link network.



Suggestions for Search Professionals and Webmasters:
Always avoid getting back-links from Link Networks. They may seem easy to get and can bring good Search Engine rankings early. But Google is all set to fight spam and low quality sites. Search Spam team of Big G cracks on culprits and penalizes and downgrads them in Google rankings. Always prepare unique content and get related quality back links. That will lead to top rankings in SERPs and qualified traffic.