What to Expect from Penguin 2.0

Big news on the inter-webs recently. Google has released what they are calling their Penguin 2.0 update. It was suppose to be a fairly significant update which put them one step closer to providing the best search results that they can according to them. So what happened? What did the release do? Well, it is too early to tell but that is something we will keep an eye on over the next few weeks. Over time, we will start to see exactly what they were targeting with his latest update but for now, it wouldn’t be wise to jump to any conclusions.

We can, however, talk about what Google has said they were trying to do with the update. That is exactly what we will do today.

Authorship

This ALWAYS gets overblown. Google has stated a few times over the years that they would like to give established and trusted experts within each niche a bump as far as rankings go. Every time this happens, I’ve seen IM’ers panic and claim “SEO is over. You can’t compete unless you are an expert” and such… This is not true. Yes, Google will be pushing towards awarding established experts, but that will only be a tiny factor among the hundreds of tiny factors that effect search engine rankings in Google. In short, no, don’t worry about this.

Link Strategies

This is the most interesting to me. Google has stated that they are going to begin looking upstream at tiered linking structures. That is a very tough thing to do but it would be a great way for them to combat advanced backlink spamming tactics. Again, Google is likely a long way to do this effectively, but it sounds like they are beginning to explore this avenue. Eventually, maybe not for another 5-10 years, Google will be pretty good at sniffing out tiered link structures. Basically, they would follow a backlink tier down stream and then pay careful attention as they follow that chain of backlinks back up towards your money site. With this information, my best guess would be that they would then penalize sites that have a lot of common backlinking chain structures. For example, If they find that a site has an unusually large amount of Wiki’s>Articles>Web 2.0’s>money site chains, that would raise a red flag. Don’t forget, this is only speculation. We will know more in a few weeks.

Less SERPs per Site

Google has also said that they are going to try and rank more sites within the first few pages. Meaning if have 2 pages ranking for a particular keyword, your strongest page is likely remain unharmed while your secondary page is likely to fall down the rankings. This is just a way Google can provide more diversity to their users.

That is all we have for now. Stay tunes because we will be visiting this topic quite often as we slowly figure out what this update is all about.