Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s web spam team, confirmed last night that the Penguin 2.0 update which he mentioned in the past couple weeks is now live.
In his ‘This Week in Google, Episode #199’ he said that it was rolling out over the next few hours. So, if you woke up to big changes with your website’s rankings, this is undoubtedly why. Matt says about 2.3% of all English queries will be impacted by this update, which is a huge number.
The first Penguin update which launched on April 24th, 2012 impacted about 3.1% of all English queries, but the two incremental updates since then only affected .1% and .3% respectively. With Trillions of individual web pages indexed by Google, 2.3% is an incredibly huge number of potentially impacted sites.
As expected, the update is targeting sites which are using spammy links to attempt to build their rankings. While Google has not, and will not, release the exact changes that were made it is part of an ongoing strategy to punish website owners who are using ‘black hat’ methods for ranking, and continue to offer users improved search results.
Only hours into the update many webmasters and SEO ‘experts’ are already feeling the pain. Of course, others are enjoying a boost in rankings as a reward for using only Google approved SEO tactics. The next few days will undoubtedly be filled with theories and rumors from disgruntled web masters.
What about you? Have you been hit by Penguin 2.0? Did your sites move up or down in the rankings?
