Google Releases Penguin Update 1.1

No matter that it’s late Friday night on the start of a three-day holiday weekend in the U.S., Google has just pushed out the first update to its recent webspam-fighting Penguin algorithm. Let’s call it Penguin 1.1.

Google’s Matt Cutts announced the news a short time ago on Twitter, calling it a “data refresh” that impacts less than one-tenth of a percent of English-language searches.

Minor weather report: We pushed 1st Penguin algo data refresh an hour ago. Affects <0 .1=".1" context="context" english="english" of="of" p="p" searches.="searches." style="margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">

— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts)

Although webmasters and SEOs have been speculating consistently in recent weeks that Google had already pushed out a Penguin update (or several), Cutts specifically says this is the first update since Penguin launched back on April 24th.

Google has described Penguin as an algorithm change that’s aimed at webspam and, more specifically, “sites that we believe are violating Google’s quality guidelines.”

Penguin led to immediate outcries from across the SEO industry, with many questioning if it made search results better or worse. Because it’s an algorithmic change, Google said it wouldn’t consider reconsideration requests made via Webmaster Central, but it did setup a form for webmasters to use if they believe Penguin had hit their sites by mistake.

Even though tonight’s update affects a small percentage of English searches, that form is still online.

For more about the Penguin update, see the articles listed below.

Postscript From Danny Sullivan: In the comments below, you’ll see some people wondering if they haven’t recovered from this update, does that means they’ll never recover and should start over. I’d wait a bit longer before that.

After Penguin 1.0 came out, Google said that anyone hit by that had been penalized. But soon after, there were examples of sites that didn’t appear to be spamming Google but which yet had traffic drops.

A few of these might have been false positives, but it’s far more reasonable to assume that when Google wiped out wide swathes of links, some sites that used to benefit from those links lost credit. In other words, they weren’t penalized — they just didn’t get as much credit as before.

I’m still trying to get Google to confirm this or not, if everyone hit by Penguin 1.0 was really penalized or if there were some who just don’t get as much credit as before, because others were penalized. Stay tuned.
Source: http://searchengineland.com/google-pushes-first-penguin-algorithm-update-122518

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Google’s Penguin Update Makes The Wall Street Journal

The Google Penguin Update is now mainstream after The Wall Street Journal covered it in a feature story named As Google Tweaks Searches, Some Get Lost in the Web.

The story interviews a few small business owners who were hit hard by the update. One business owner saw his sales drop to $25,000 this month, down from $68,000 the previous month. Another small website owner saw roughly 30% of his traffic disappear over night. And another lost 20% of their traffic. Most of the article goes through small business owners who lives have changed for the worse due to this update. But there are some stories that lead me to believe they are not directly related to Penguin.

Again, there were several updates last month – Penguin was happened on the 24th. But there were two Panda refreshes, link network penalties, bugs and many more updates.

Even if all those cases were not Penguin related, Penguin is now main stream after hitting a major publication like the Wall Street Journal.

Source: http://searchengineland.com/googles-penguin-update-makes-the-wall-street-journal-121733

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