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.
— 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.
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.