Penguin 2.0 and Other Changes That Lie Ahead For SEO in 2013

Following the top SEO mistakes that Matt Cutts recently released, he yet again posted another video yesterday on GoogleWebmasterHelp channel, this time, to talk about some of the things Google’s webspam team is working on. One of the highlights of this video is Matt saying that Penguin 2.o (or Penguin 4 if you are counting the updates like SearchEngineLand.com does) will soon be deployed, and is going to be more comprehensive than that of Penguin 1.x. According to him, this update will “impact” (or hit), a lot more than the previous updates.

So, should we all panic? The answer to that question will always be difficult. My guess is that if you are doing things right from the very beginning, you should be on the clear. In any event, let’s hear what Matt has to say, as perhaps this could help you to do some cleaning up, before the “tidal wave” begins. It will happen!

What should we expect in the next few months in terms of SEO for Google?

To begin, you will notice that Matt (as usual) makes all kinds of disclosures and disclaimers that for now, this is what they are working on. However, he mentions that things change and therefore, the information he provides should be taken with a “grain of salt”…

Advertorials (Advertisements in the form of editorial content)

Matt mentions that they are also looking at advertorials that may be violating their quality guidelines. If you remember the “interflora” case, you may have seen that they were “hit” by Google due to a campaign they launched for valentines day. Matt further mentions that “taking money” to sponsor posts or links is not necessarily a bad thing, provided that those links DO NOT pass PageRank and that they should be disclosed as not being organic.

Denying Value To Link Spammers

Link spammers should soon feel the wrath of Google? Matt mentions that he is very excited to see how things are evolving to deny the value to link spammers.

… some people who spam links in various ways. We’ve got some nice ideas on ways that that becomes less effective, and so we expect that that will roll out over the next few months as well. In fact, we’re working on a completely different system that does more sophisticated link analysis…

Hacked Sites

Google has already launched Webmasters help for hacked sites recently, but they still want to continue on working on how to better detect them, and provide help for webmasters. He expects that to roll out a next-generation site detection system, that is even more comprehensive. The idea is to help webmasters get more information and hopefully point them in the right way to clean up those hacked sites.

Authority Sites

We have also been working on a lot of ways to help regular webmasters. We’re doing a better job of detecting when someone is more of an authority on a specific space…

Is this “Author Rank”? Maybe, maybe not, but it is clear that Google wants to rank better those people that are deemed authoritative on specific subjects. This should balance and improve rankings for those that are considered sort of an authority site.  Time to work on your online authority and implement authorship?

Panda Updates

This one is a bit of a good news. Matt mentions that they are looking at some additional signals to determine the quality of a site, and soften a bit those that are somewhat in the gray area of quality. This should help improve those sites to “recover” a little, which have previously been affected (to some extent) by Panda.

Other notes

Matt also mentions about trying to improve the cluster of results that are from one domain. Sometimes, you will see more results from the same domain deeper in the search results. He said that they are looking to change the results which would basically avoid users from seeing more results as you go deeper into the next pages of Google’s SERPs.

Finally, he also said that they are trying to figure out how to give more information to webmasters, by providing more details and examples that webmasters can use to diagnose their site.

That’s it! What do you think about this upcoming “wave” of changes? Are you concerned about the big “Penguin 2.o” that’s about to roll out?