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)

Proper Keyword Distribution in Anchor Text for good Search Rankings

After the release of Penguin update by Google, sometime back SEOTacklebox did a webinar about keywords, linking and search ranking. Later they revisited that data after allowing plenty of time to gather more information and came to some conclusions about the best distribution of anchor text for ranking in Google.

It is well known by now that Google does not want people gaming their search algorithm. But still their search results are a product of computer generated algorithm. No person is sitting there to decide, which websites rank and which sites don't, for all search phrases. Due to this basic fact, there will always be ways to improve your search rankings by associating your site with what Google is looking for.

Link building for better search rankings is still necessary. Links are still the primary way, due to which Google decides what sites to rank where. The difference after Penguin update is that now the links need to be distributed in a natural manner rather than a keyword based manner. SEOMOZ published an article sometime ago, about the research on 10 national brand websites, that rank very well in the search engines. They broke down the percentages of links by anchor text. They came up with is a good formula for link building strategy.

Results found shown that about 65% of the links were exact match, phrase matching or brand matching with regards to the anchor text. The breakdown between these three categories was 18% exact match, 17% phrase match and 30% brand match. Remaining 35% back-links were evenly divided between the URL as the anchor text and other unrelated anchor text.

It presents a great scheme to design your own link building strategy. Using the ratios above, here is what a sample link building strategy might look like for a site, called "Widget World" selling "Red Widgets". For every 100 links built, the following should be done:

• 18 links with anchor text of "Red Widgets" – this is the Exact match
• 17 links with anchor text containing Red Widgets, such as "Handy Red Widgets", "Waterproof Red Widgets" etc – this is the Phrase match
• 30 links with anchor text of "Widget World" or slight variation – this is the Brand
• 18 links with the anchor text of "yoursitename.com" – this is the URL
• 17 links with random anchor text – this could be long tail phrases like "see more about Red Widgets at our site" or simple phrases like "click here"

This is a simplistic breakdown, but the data backs up these general ratios as being the target. Regardless of whether the back links are built all naturally or built by you or outsourced, if you keep to this ratio you will not be degraded by Google, and you will see your search rankings increase.

When building these links, you can consider building higher page rank or PR links for the first line item – the exact match phrase. This will hopefully transfer a little more link juice through that phrase. When you combine that with the varied anchor text, adhering to these ratios, you have a winning formula for better search rankings.

Source(s):
http://seotacklebox.com/blog/proper-anchor-text-distribution-for-better-rankings/
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/anchor-text-distribution-avoiding-over-optimization