Penguin 2.0: Google Continues Its Effort to Reduce Web Spam

Thursday, May 23, 2013

Driving Digital Performance

Penguin 2.0: Google continues its effort to reduce web spam

POV

Contact Ryan Mayberry [email protected] 917.326.7131

Background

On May 22, Google made another significant effort to deter manipulative link building practices when it made the fourth revision to its Penguin Update – an algorithm change that devalues and penalizes these practices. Referred to as Penguin 2.0, this algorithm update affects approximately 2.3% of English queries, which is less than the original Penguin update (3.1%), but significantly greater than previous refreshes (0.3%).

Matt Cutts, the Head of Google’s Web Spam Team, finalized the announcement on his blog, along with a suggestion that there will be more changes in the coming months as Google continues its effort to fight link spam.

Specifically, Cutts shares that they will be focusing on the following: Advertorials – Sites acquiring low quality, paid for content pieces to pass PageRank. Link spammers and more sophisticated link analysis – Link networks and sites that are monetizing purely through link selling. Google seems to want to widen the net in targeting these by refining its ability to detect unnatural link patterns on site’s back link profiles. Spammy query targeting – Google will focus their link spam defense efforts more on terms that are spammy in nature. SERP’s for keywords such as “Payday Loans” have been filled with irrelevant results from hacked sites and doorway pages. Link diversity – A deeper analysis of the quality of links.

Matt Cutts also suggests that there will be a focus on penalizing websites that are selling links and joining link networks in an effort to manipulate Google’s rankings.

What Is Link Spam?

Link spam includes any type of internal or external linking that is unnatural and is intended to manipulate Google’s algorithm. Before the original Penguin release, link spam was a successful method for moving low quality websites to the top rankings for competitive terms. Engaging in link spam is often a smaller investment that yields faster results than natural ways of attracting external links. As a result, many companies resorted to using unethical link building practices – also known as “black hat” – in order to achieve higher rankings.

Common methods of link spam include the following: Purchasing site-wide links Paying bloggers to link to your site within a post Any type of link scheme Posting low quality articles on article sites intended only to gain links back to your site Automated posting of links in forums Bulk commenting on articles in order to gain links back to your site Unnatural keyword targeted anchor text Low quality press release distribution

While most manipulative link building comes in the form of acquiring external links, the Penguin update also targets internal link spam. Excessive internal linking using exact match anchor text is another form of manipulative optimization that can cause a negative reaction from the Penguin update.

Significance of Link Spam

The Penguin 2.0 update and the announcement of additional efforts to improve Google’s defense against link spam is a clear indicator that (1) the Google algorithm will still rely heavily

on links to determine search results in the foreseeable future, and (2) there are still websites succeeding in search from manipulative link building.

With the introduction of social factors playing a role in the search engine algorithms, some have speculated the eventual demise of external links as a significant determinant of search engine results. While introducing new elements will clearly devalue the original factors to a degree, iProspect believes that links will remain a strong factor going forward.

As long as links are a strong determinant in search rankings, there will always be black hat link builders looking to manipulate the system. Google’s announcement of an aggressive summer offensive against manipulative link builders is a clear sign that link manipulation is still an issue. However, it also shows Google’s determination in removing those associated with link spam from their search results. Those engaging in link spam will be “less likely to show up,” Cutts believes, “by the end of the summer.”

What to Expect from iProspect

Google hasn’t moved the goalposts with Penguin – they are still looking to reward sites with great content at its heart. iProspect has been aligned with this approach for many years – ensuring that this type of content is the focus of our onsite and offsite strategies.

We believe in following Google’s guidelines for search engine optimization without engaging in manipulative tactics. Our approach focuses on ensuring that websites are accessible to the search engines and properly indexed for relevant terms, while continuously developing quality content that provides value to users. iProspect will continue to work with our clients to attract natural external links and follow Google’s Webmaster guidelines for onsite optimization and internal linking.

Since Google’s Penguin updates focus on penalizing websites benefiting from web spam, it is unlikely that Penguin 2.0 will negatively affect a company partnering with iProspect. However, there are some instances where sites lose rankings due to imperfections in Google’s spam targeting, or to a company’s history of generating spammy links.

During this update we will also be: Monitoring: over the coming weeks we are going to monitor all of our client’s site traffic and ranking visibility to assess if any positive or negative changes or trends occur as a result of the Penguin update.

Analyzing: we are running all of our client’s domains through bespoke tools in order to analyze and identify any part of the link profile that may be at risk given the way Google is likely to evaluate and rank sites from now on.

Preventing: we are continuously striving to plan and implement link building strategies that will safeguard our client’s sites from spam filters and reflect Google’s quality criteria.

For iProspect clients, your account team will follow up with you throughout the next few weeks to provide you with information on whether your site was affected by the next generation release and to inform you of any trends we have identified in the early stages of the Penguin 2.0 rollout.