Penguin 2.1
After the announcement of Google Penguin 2.1, Google’s Matt Cutts said that the new version of Penguin will only affect approximately 1% of searches “to a noticeable degree”. Although the latest release may not have had as big of an effect as the previous 2.0 release, it still has shown a drastically larger impact than the previous smaller refreshes.
Penguin 2.1 is still targeting the same kinds of links that previous updates have gone after.The true difference between Penguin 2.0 and Penguin 2.1 is the deeper level of analysis; the ability Google hasto crawl and analyze even deeper level pages to identify “spammy” activities that are taking place deeper within the website.
It’s been just over 2 months since the Google update Penguin 2.0 was unleashed, and the storm seems to finally be calming but everybody wants to know: What did Penguin 2.0 focus on and filter? What was the difference between Penguin 2.0 and Penguin 1.0? How can I recover my sites rankings and measures can be taken to prevent my site from getting penalized again? Is it worth it to attempt to save my current domain or start with a clean slate by using a new domain?
Let’s take a look back at the first Penguin SEO update, it really shook up the SEO community by targeting link spam. With the crosshairs aimed at link spam, thousands upon thousands of people felt it when the trigger was pulled. The people hit by Penguin 1.0 had quite a mess to clean and attempt to recover from, some had rankings completely vanish for their head terms or the long tail terms. Others had noticed a drastic 30%-80% loss in organic traffic. Penguin 1.0 was explicitly targeting networks of links, paid links, high anchor density, and high numbers of low quality links. There are actually some sites that still have penalties from Penguin 1.0 that have yet to be removed.
An overwhelming number of Money keywords in anchor text seemed to be the common denominator after analyzing hundreds of Penguin 2.0 affected sites. Having a high density of brand anchor terms, and a high number of “noise” or “other” terms seem to save the worries of having a penguin penalty. One giveaway to the Google Penguin update is the strategy of using an inappropriate amount of money keywords, and this has left many webmasters looking to a penguin recovery service to save their rankings.
There’s a good chance the majority of people searching for Penguin recovery services or are scrambling for penguin recovery strategies are the ones who were hit hardest from the Google update. There are some people who are attempting to recover from a Penguin penalty and are noticing that there are sites that didn’t get hit from Penguin yet they had a high density of money anchor text. This seems to be a sign that a major aspect of Penguin 2.0 is the comparison of competitor backlink profiles.