Some of the world’s biggest spammers and black hatters tremble at the thought of Google’s latest update code-named Penguin 2.0. The update is still very new and fresh from the oven, but we all should be able to see its first effects during the next few months. So, is there life after Google’s newest update? Is there a glimmer of hope in case you have been using black hat techniques for years? If you have been hit hard, can you still recover from its effects? I guess we will find out soon.
We all know how Google thinks. If you are a webmaster, Google wants your website to be compelling and informative so that people come back to it and bookmark it for further reference. If your website is high quality, you have nothing to worry about and you can relax now. Spam websites with tons of paid links do not fall into this category, and Google wants to eliminate them from search engines at all cost.
Penguin 2.0 addresses black hat web spam and targets it. For example, according to Google’s algorithms, if someone pays for an advertorial to appear on a website, those ads shouldn’t raise a website’s page rank as much as natural links that weren’t paid for. If paid links appear on the website, there should be a clear and conspicuous disclosure somewhere on the site so that the visitors know that the links were paid for. According to Google’s policies, spam websites with tons of paid links violate Google’s quality guidelines, and such advertorials shouldn’t increase the page rank of a website. The bottom line is that spammers will be targeted and hit hard, and more sophisticated link analysis will be put to place. We should also see less paid content on websites while natural links are going to be favored even more than ever.
One interesting feature of the newest update is how Google is going to decide which search results to show and which ones to hide. Internet users will be less likely to see many results from the same webpage displayed. Seeing a cluster of similar results from one website shouldn’t happen anymore.
Google’s Penguin 2.0 is also an attempt made by Google to communicate better with webmasters. Improving detection of hacked sites is another initiative of Penguin 2.0. We will have to see if Google is able to keep their promises and live up to our expectations.