Google Penguin 4 is now playing live and deepening this summer

Penguin 2.0 generation spam fighting will continue to roll out and keep you on your toes (or flippers)

This version of penguin is going to be more dramatic than the previous ones according to director Matt Cutts. He said that for some of the very competitive spaces like porn and payday loans this will have an even greater affect.

Here is a recap of the Penguin releases as listed on Search Engine Land yesterday.

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)

Matt mentioned that for sites in a kind of gray area where they had crossed a little over the line of black hat they are actually trying to soften things a bit by looking at additional signals of authority. Unfortunately even say what those signals of authority are but as usual he talked about how if you have quality content you should be okay. But if you’re hanging out on black Forums and trading spammy links than you’re going to have a very interesting summer.

Here is Matt’s recent video:

Since our MO is to preach quality content and build yourself as an authority, I’m assuming our sites and clients will be okay but you really have to keep an eye on this and what is going on.

One blog commenter said “Looks like Adwords out of money again” lol. Google really is sitting in a nice position for themselves. They get to refine and tweak their algorithms and make it very difficult for websites to rank well as part of the public web spam cleanup process and at the same time drive people to spend a ton more money on Google Adwords.

I think it’s very important to diversify your Internet marketing campaigns and this is yet another reason to leverage a variety of tactics that work symbiotically together. It will take some time to figure out how to deal with these new versions of Penguin but as usual, doing quality content marketing, social media marketing, email marketing, public relations and a modicum of paid search (including promoted posts and social ads) will help to make you less completely reliant on Google organic and help make you more of an authority at the same time.

In the meantime take a hard look at your back link profile for any signs of sketchy links that you or your SEO companies in the past may have gotten. Just yesterday we saw loads of Polish domain websites with malware on them linking to one of our potential new clients that were likely done maliciously by one of their competitors. If you’re not aware of these things you won’t be able to fix or counteract them. At the very least you need to embark on legitimate link building campaigns such as high quality guest blog posting to overpower the crappy links that you might have.

Grab some digital popcorn and stay tuned for more on this Penguin dancing drama as we test our theories on building greater trust and authority.

What are some ways you could increase the likelihood of seeing some “Penguin softening”?

photo credit: OiMax via photopin cc

Recap of the Penguin release link here

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