Matt Cutts, one of Google’s lead spam engineers, is telling my industry that another large algorithm update is coming in the upcoming weeks. He has stated that it will be an important update and may impact many sites. Google is calling this pending update Penguin 2.0.
Many sites got hit severely by Google last year with the double whammy called Penguin and Panda and most have still not recovered. In fact according to a recent article only 5% of the sites affected have been able to re-mediate their placement. Hit hard were e-commerce website that do not have unique product content and sites with duplicate content. But additionally hit were legitimate websites that had tried to boost their organic placement by using link farms, link exchanges, and link spam creation.
Matt Cutts again states for the record that websites that have unique, well-written, shareable content will benefit from these upcoming algorithm updates but others who do not have this focus will see their placement drop. Here’s an article online that provides a nice short synopsis about what Penguin 2.0 will be doing. This Penguin update will focus on inbound links again as in the previous Penguin update of 2012.
On our end, we’ve already started to see site owners look to mix up their anchor text and move away from repetitive keyword dense anchor text in content and blog posts. Cutts states that this algorithm will be a big one and we recommend that you not ignore his warnings.