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Thursday, May 23, 2013

Google Penguin 2.0 Update rolled out to fight more Web Spam

Google Penguin 2.0 Update, which was the talk of the SEO World of late, finally rolled out on 22 May 2013 afternoon. It affected 2.3% of U.S. English queries. It was also rolled out for other languages world-wide. Scope of Penguin update varies by language, such that the languages with more web spam will be more targeted.


Google's head of Web Spam, Matt Cutts had first announced in March, that soon there would be the next algorithm update of Penguin. On 10 May 2013, he hinted about the impending next generation of Penguin to Search professionals and Webmasters on Twitter by saying: "we do expect to roll out Penguin 2.0 (next generation of Penguin) sometime in the next few weeks though."

Cutts went into more detail in a Google Webmaster Help video on what Penguin 2.0 would unleash regarding Web Search. He also elaborated what new changes webmasters and SEOs can expect over the coming months with regards to Google search results.

He officially revealed about Penguin 2.0 roll-out late Wednesday afternoon on the #199: A Pixel Sandwich episode of This Week in Google show of TWiT.TV. He said on the talk show: "It's gonna have a pretty big impact on web spam. It's a brand new generation of algorithms. The previous iteration of Penguin would essentially 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."

He highlighted more details on Penguin 2.0 in a new post on his own blog, titled Penguin 2.0 rolled out today, saying that the roll out aiming at fighting more web spam is now complete and affects 2.3 percent of English-U.S. queries, and that it affects non-English queries as well. He wrote:

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.

Source(s):
Penguin 2.0 rolled out today
Google Penguin 2.0 Update is Live
Penguin 4, With Penguin 2.0 Generation Spam-Fighting, Is Now Live
Google Pushed Out The Major Penguin Update (v2.0 #4)