It’s that time again. Google is scaring the pants off of business owners and webmasters ’round the world with their public decree that Penguin 2.0 is imminent and will be coming in the next few weeks (cue the Jaws music).
The goal of Penguin 2.0 is to target and devalue more black hat spam. It will go deeper than the original Penguin and have a much bigger impact.
Some businesses are going to have a very good – or a very bad – summer ahead of them.
Here are a few things that will be affected:
- Advertorials –specifically not following Google’s guidelines
- Problematic search terms like “payday loans” that have historically been spammy
- Devaluing link buying
- Helping hacked sites
- Increasing visibility of authority sites
- Panda additional signals
You should be worried about Google changes if you have:
- Hired some person/some company to do SEO for you and you have no insight into their techniques
- Been hanging out a lot in black hat spammy forums and have implented any ideas tossed around there
- Been link spamming. Or buying back links on Fiverr
- Spent sleepless nights tossing and turning thinking about how to quickly rise in the rankings and game the system. And then acted on those aforementioned thoughts.
Matt Cutts of Google Speaks Out About Penguin 2.0
Here is a good summary if you’d like a little more in-depth info.
Are you worried? Excited? Indifferent? Share your thoughts below.
I truly feel for the many well-meaning businesses whose rankings and sales were hit hard once they were penalized and lost rankings. But I’m excited for the businesses who have been doing things right so they can start getting the rankings they deserve for putting out good content and staying on the white-hat side of SEO.
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Jenny Munn
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2 Comments
Jenny,
It’s like I tell my boys – if you haven’t done anything wrong you don’t have anything to worry about. Those who knowingly or unknowingly have walked into potentially troubling waters have something to worry about and from that probably need to re-consider their strategy or in some cases who they are outsourcing their SEO efforts to. Follow best practices at all times and you’ll in all likelihood come out on the good end of the stick.
Hi Ben – love that analogy! I do find that a small handful of people truly don’t know they did anything wrong, but most of the time you know if you have engaged in an SEO activity that may be questionable: if you’re a blogger who has accepted money for a sponsored post and did not “no follow” the link, if you have bought links on Fiverr, if you have paid an SEO company to do something and you have no idea what they did, if you have blasted out the same article across the web to thousands of sites, etc. Otherwise you’re in pretty good shape! Thanks for commenting, Ben. 🙂