Here is an important notice as reported by our friend, Adrienne Erin:
After several weeks of baited breath and waves of smaller changes to Google’s algorithm, it seems that the penguin is at last out of the bag, as announced by Google Webspam Head Matt Cutts on his blog on May 22. According to Cutts, 2.3% of English-US queries are affected by the update, the largest percentage since the original roll out of Penguin 1.0 in April 2012. The update also affects searches in other languages to different extents; according to some, the impact was greater in German-language queries than English. The goal of the update was to reward genuinely valuable sites, and punish sites that have gained ranking with black hat techniques.
The original Penguin was Google’s first update to specifically combat off-page factors, especially targeting link networks and unnatural linking strategies. This update affected over 3% of all English queries, dramatically altering the search engine’s results pages and obliterating any ranking for some particularly bad, black hat offenders.
Penguin 2.0 uses new, highly advanced spam-fighting techniques that continue to punish unusual and “fishy” activity, penalizing sites that acquire large numbers of links very rapidly (usually through paid means), that get links from irrelevant sites, and those that overuse exact match anchor text. This update also will be specifically targeting ads with dofollow links (since the introduction of the nofollow tag, Google has told webmasters to use it to differentiate paid links and avoid passing on ranking value and trust), and improve the detection of hacked sites.
An Unexpected Boost to Local Results
Amidst the panic surrounding Penguin 2.0, Trevin Shirey from the SEO company WebpageFX seems to have been the first to notice an unusual trend in the SERPs. According to Shirey, Google seems to have been integrating large numbers of localized results into organic searches.
In their examples, such as a search for “hockey” in Dallas, Texas or a search for “marketing” in Miami, Florida, up to 5 results on the first page are local, sometimes even ranking above the results one would expect to see, such as Wikipedia.
The hockey example is especially striking, with two Dallas Stars results from stars.nhl.com appearing above the Wikipedia page for ice hockey. The Dallas Stars’ Wikipedia page also features prominently in the results.
You will probably notice some of these changes to broad keyword searches in your own queries. For me, in a search for “chocolate,” my favorite local café (which happens to also sell chocolate) appears above Ghirardelli, a premium international chocolate company, in the results. WebpageFX gives some other examples of searches to try, such as “ford,” “coffee,” and “computers.” You will probably see some of your favorite local spots featuring highly, as well as business listing websites such as Yelp and Yahoo! Places.
This is definitely a great bonus for local businesses. As Shirey puts it, “local and regional businesses could stand to gain from an update like this as it increases their exposure for informational queries.” However, he adds that it is unclear how this change will be perceived by Google’s users. He adds, “Do searchers really want such hyper-local results for broad queries? Google’s research must show that they do.”
How has your business fared since the onset of the newest rendition of Penguin? Share your experiences in the comments.
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