The fourth release of Google’s spam-fighting “Penguin Update” is now live. But, Penguin 4 has a twist. It contains Penguin 2.0 technology under the hood, which Google says is a new generation of tech that should better stop spam. Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s Web spam team, announced the new Penguin 2.0 update during […]

May 22, 2013 at 6:09 pm

The fourth release of Google’s spam-fighting “Penguin Update” is now live. But, Penguin 4 has a twist. It contains Penguin 2.0 technology under the hood, which Google says is a new generation of tech that should better stop spam.

Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s Web spam team, announced the new Penguin 2.0 update during This Week in Google (Episode #199). He referenced the earlier video of himself talking about the next generation Penguin update, and said this is being rolled out “within the next few hours.”

Webmasters and SEOs: expect major changes to the search results. Matt specifically said that 2.3% of English queries will be noticeably impacted by this update.

Cutts later posted more details about this roll out on his blog. He explained that the launch is now complete, including for non-English languages, and that “the scope of Penguin varies by language, e.g. languages with more webspam will see more impact.”

Previous Penguin Updates:

Penguin 4? Penguin 2.0? We name each release of Penguin in sequential order, so it’s easy to know when one happened. The list so far:

• 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)

But after the first release, the second and third still were data refreshes of the same basic Penguin algorithm with only minor changes. This fourth release is a major change, so big that Google has referred to it as Penguin 2.0 internally.

Penguin 2.0 Goes Deeper, Impacting More Webmasters

As we covered earlier, Matt said in a recent video that this Penguin update is a major update that goes go deeper than the original Penguin update and will impact many more SEOs and webmasters than the first generation version. Here is that video again: