Google Penguin 2.0 update #4 changes May 22 2013

Penguin 2.0 (#4) — May 22, 2013

After months of speculation bordering on hype, the 4th Penguin update (dubbed "2.0" by Google) arrived with only moderate impact. The exact nature of the changes were unclear, but some evidence suggested that Penguin 2.0 was more finely targeted to the page level.

Penguin 4, With Penguin 2.0 Generation Spam-Fighting, Is Now Live

The fourth release of Google’s spam-fighting “Penguin Update” is now live. But, Penguin 4 has a twist. It contains Penguin2.0 technology under the hood, which Google says is a new generation of tech that should better stop spam.

 

Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s Web spam team, announced the new Penguin 2.0 update during ThisWeek in Google (Episode #199). He referenced the earlier video of himself talking about the next generation Penguin update, and said this is being rolled out “within the next few hours.”

Webmasters and SEOs: expect major changes to the search results. Matt specifically said that 2.3% of English queries will be noticeably impacted by this update.

Cutts later posted more details about this roll out onhis blog. He explained that the launch is now complete, including for non-English languages, and that “the scope of Penguin varies by language, e.g. languages with more webspam will see more impact.”

Previous Penguin Updates:

Penguin 4? Penguin 2.0? We name each release of Penguin in sequential order, so it’s easy to know when one happened. The list so far:

• Penguin 1 on April 24, 2012 (impacting ~3.1% of queries)
• Penguin 2 on May 26, 2012 (impacting less than 0.1%)
• Penguin 3 on October 5, 2012 (impacting ~0.3% of queries)
• Penguin 4 on May 22, 2013 (impacting 2.3% of queries)

But after the first release, the second and third still were data refreshes of the same basic Penguin algorithm with only minor changes. This fourth release is a major change, so big that Google has referred to it as Penguin 2.0 internally.