Google’s Matt Cutts announced late on Friday that Penguin 2.1 was launching, affecting roughly 1% of searches “to a noticeable degree.”
Penguin 2.0 was the biggest improvement to Penguin since the update initially launched in April of last year. In the latest update we get several refreshes in between.
Penguin 2.0 was said to affect 2.3% of queries with previous data refreshes only impacting 0.1% and 0.3%. The initial Penguin update affected 3.1%. While this latest version (2.1) may not be as big as 2.0 or the original, the 1% of queries affected still represents a significantly larger query set than the other past minor refreshes.
Penguin, of course, is designed to attack webspam. Here’s what Google said about it in the initial launch:
The change will decrease rankings for sites that we believe are violating Google’s existing quality guidelines. We’ve always targeted webspam in our rankings, and this algorithm represents another improvement in our efforts to reduce webspam and promote high quality content. While we can’t divulge specific signals because we don’t want to give people a way to game our search results and worsen the experience for users, our advice for webmasters is to focus on creating high quality sites that create a good user experience and employ white hat SEO methods instead of engaging in aggressive webspam tactics.
We have seen screen shots of Google Analytics showing websites completely destroyed by this update. I’ve also seen screen shots of Google Analytics showing websites that recovered in a major way from previous Penguin updates. This had huge swings both ways for webmasters and SEOs. Some recovered and are back in business, while others are about to lose their businesses. Also, some it had no impact on at all. Like you all know, when one web site drops another one takes it place. – See more at: http://www.seroundtable.com/google-penguin-21-big-17479.html#sthash.oZsXpUjz.dpuf