Head of Webspam at Google, Matt Cutts confirmed via his twitter feed yesterday that a penguin 2.0 update is expected in the next couple of weeks. Following this, he posted a video titled ‘What should we expect in the next few months in terms of SEO for Google’.
The Penguin update 1.0 announced on 24th April 2012, works to decrease search engine rankings of websites that violate Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. The Guidelines consider ‘black-hat’ techniques as an indicator of violation.
Black-hat techniques.
Both content spam and link spam come under the category of ‘black-hat’ techniques. These include, keyword-stuffing, where webmasters stuff the content with the relevant keywords in order to gain rankings. High levels of this greatly hinder user experience. Hidden text or invisible text, meta-tag stuffing and other such methods of content spam qualify as violations in Google eyes. For Link spam, link farming techniques, hidden links and anything that can be triggered as a ‘un-natural link’ such as a large volume of links gained in a short space of time is considered a violation.
Penguin 2.0 and what to expect in 2013.
Cutt’s online video and Twitter feed confirms the rumors of an update. He explains in the video that the Penguin 2.0 version goes deeper into sites to determine the spam in a more ‘comprehensive’ manner.
Other features of interest to us at Dental Design due to arrive in the summer of 2013 include help for webmasters to define their sites which have ‘real authority’ in a given field. He mentions the field of ‘medical’ in explaining how this would work. The idea being that Google are going to be working towards ways of delivering relevant sites that have an ‘authority’ in a subject to best suit the searcher.
Google continue to indicate that they are dedicated to finding black-hat techniques and tidy up the web. Before his video, Cutt’s provides the usual assurance that Google want to rank sites that provide compelling, interesting and relevant information that people love, want to return to and tell their friends about. Our aim is to fulfill this brief in order to enjoy high Google rankings for our sites. We’ll be keeping an eye on the roll-out and responding accordingly, as per usual.
For any more information about the above or about online marketing, call Dental Design on 01202 677 277.