Google’s Matt Cutts confirmed a few days ago via Twitter that a major overhaul of its Penguin algorithm will happen in the next few weeks (middle-end of May). Although Matt Cutts didn’t specify the exact changes likely to be made, hey, he does work for Google after all, but it’s a pretty safe bet to assume it will target more black hat link building tactics used by some SEO and link building companies to improve search engine rankings for clients.
In the 7 minute “Webmaster Help” video below, Google’s Matt Cutts gives the low down on what Google’s webspam team has planned for summer 2013… and what it all means for webmasters. It involves the Penguin and Panda update, paid advertorials, hacked sites, link analysis, link spam, and lots more.
One thing however has not changed and that is the advice from Google to make sure you have a great compelling website that users love, that they'll want to tell their friends about, bookmark, come back to, visit over and over again. If you follow this goal, Google will reward you because that’s what they want for their users.
Watch the video here and below we pull out 10 things (with quotes from Matt Cutts) that we can expect from this new Google update:
1. Penguin 2.0 – many calling it Penguin 4
SEO’s will be anxious as Danny Sullivan pointed out that SEO’s and webmasters who did manage to clean up sites after the initial penguin update could have triggered something else. On the contrary, it could also be possible to see substantial gains in rankings for many clients as all the black hat work is thrown out. It will be interesting to see who ranks in top 10 for ‘payday loans’ or ‘online casino’ after the new Google Penguin update – I hope all those who implemented white hat quality link building tactics will be laughing.
Matt says
“We’re relatively close to deploying the next generation of Penguin. Internally, we call it “Penguin 2.0″. And again, Penguin is a webspam change that’s dedicated to try to find black hat webspam and try to target and address that. So this one is a little more comprehensive than Penguin 1.0 and we expect it to go a little bit deeper and have a little bit more of an impact than the original version of Penguin.”
2. Advertorials
On February 21st 2013, Martin Macdonald broke the news about the demise of Interflora’s search engine rankings. It was a wake up call to anyone using advertorials as part of their link building strategy. David Naylor published an article highlighting that advertorials were the reason for the action.
Google’s war against paid advertorials that pass page rank looks certain to continue this summer.
Matt says
“We’ve also been looking at advertorials that is sort of native advertising and those sorts of things that violate our quality guidelines. So again, if someone pays for coverage or pays for an ad or something like that, those ads should not flow PageRank. We’ve seen a few sites in the US and around the world that take money and then do link to websites and pass PageRank. So we’ll be looking at some efforts to be a little bit stronger on our enforcement as far as advertorials that violate our quality guidelines. Now there’s nothing wrong inherently with advertorials or native advertising, but they should not flow PageRank and there should be clear and conspicuous disclosure so that users realize that something is paid, not organic or editorial.”
3. Cleaning up specific queries
Cleaning up search queries within historically spammy niches such as 'payday loans' and 'online casinos'. If they are all up to it, who will be left to rank?
Matt says
“It’s kind of interesting. We get a lot of great feedback from outside of Google. For example, there were people complaining about searches like “payday loans” on Google.co.uk. So we have two different changes that try to tackle those kinds of queries in a couple different ways. We can’t get into too much detail about exactly how they work, but I’m kind of excited that we’re going from having just general queries be a little more cleaned to going to some of these areas that have traditionally been a little more spammy including, for example, some more pornographic queries. And some of these changes might have a little bit more of an impact in those kinds of areas that are a little more contested by various spammers and that sort of thing.”
4. Denying the value of link spammers
If you're a link spammer, the likelihood is if you somehow managed to survive previous Google updates, they are going to nail you this time round. Anything involving obtaining links via automation or part of link networks will be probably be targeted and comment spammers.
Matt says
“We’re also looking at some ways to go upstream to deny the value to link spammers – some people who spam links in various ways. We’ve got some nice ideas on trying to make sure that that becomes less effective and so we expect that that will roll out over the next few months as well.”
5. More sophisticated link analysis
Link analysis...now we get down to the nitty gritty but the details are very vague from Matt. This has the potential to be a real game changer so get ready for this.
Matt says
“And in fact, we’re working on a completely different system that does more sophisticated link analysis. We’re still in the early days for that, but it’s pretty exciting. We’ve got some data now that we’re ready to start using and see how good it looks and we’ll see whether that bears fruit or not.”
6. Detecting hacked sites better
This includes better communication and information for webmasters.
Matt says
“We also continue to work on hacked sites in a couple different ways, number one trying to detect them better. We hope in the next few months to roll out a next generation of hacked sites detection that is even more comprehensive, and also try to communicate better to webmasters, because sometimes they/we see confusion between hacked sites and sites that serve up malware. And ideally you have a one-stop shop where once someone realizes that they have been hacked. They can go to webmaster tools and have some single spot they can go where they get a lot more info to sort of point them in the right way to hopefully clean up those hacked sites… We’re also going to be looking for ways we can provide more concrete details, more example URLs that webmasters can use to figure out where to go diagnose their site.”
7. Respect My Authority!
By the sounds of it and what other SEO people have been saying, this is likely to refer to author rank and this recent post on author rank by Eric Enge and of course SEOmoz is well worth reading.
Matt says
“We’re doing a better job of detecting when someone is sort of an authority in a specific space — could be medical or could be travel or whatever — and trying to make sure that those rank a little more highly if you’re some sort of authority or a site, that according to the algorithms, we think might be a little more appropriate for users.”
8. Softening Panda’s Blow
Some legit sites were unintentionally harmed by Google’s updates which they want to avoid so this update looks to specifically review previous affected sites by examining additional quality signals.
Matt says
“We’ve also been looking at Panda and seeing if we can find some additional signals and we think we’ve got some to help refine things for the sites that are kinda in the border zone/in the grey area a little bit. So if we can soften the effect a little bit for those sites that we believe have some additional signals of quality that will help sites that might have previously been effected to some degree by Panda.”
9. Refining Domain Clusters
Lots of people noticed that from page 3 onwards in Google results, there is often several results from one domain. This new Penguin update looks like it will be addressing this.
Matt says
“We’ve also heard a lot of feedback from some people about that if I go down three pages deep I’ll see a cluster of several results all from one domain. We’ve actually made things better that you’re less likely to see that on the first page and more likely to see that on the following pages. And we’re looking at a change which might deploy which would basically say that once you’ve seen a cluster of results from one site then you’d be less likely to see more results from that site as you go deeper into the next pages of Google search results.”
10. Exciting Changes?
In a nutshell, those link builders using spammy black hat techniques will have little impact in search results by the end of the summer. Small to medium sized businesses should come out well too.
Matt says
“I think it’s going to be a lot of fun. I’m really excited about a lot of these changes because we do see really good improvements in terms of people who are link spamming or doing various black hat spam would be less likely to show up I think by the end of the summer. And at the same time we’ve got a lot of nice changes queued up that hopefully will help small/medium businesses and regular webmasters as well.”
What all this means to link building companies?
The Google updates over the past year or so has meant link building companies around the world, not just here in the UK have required to stop old-school link building tactics and focus on what Google wants. Following online marketing principles with the user in mind and not links is what Google wants and they call this “user intent”. Google wants user experience improvements and provide high quality search results that understand what the user wants to see instead of what marketers want the user to see.
With this in mind, the following link building tactics should play a big role within link building strategies in the months ahead:
High quality content – relevant to a given search that aligns with a companies
business/industry/products
Relevant links – not over optimised anchor text links but natural link text being used. Relevancy + Quality + Shareability is a good stance
Social signals – utilise social media, engage with it
Niche directories – there are some gems around
Relationship building - important to engage with and build relationships with key bloggers and influencers
Guest blogging – find quality relevant sites to regularly guest post on. Do not over optimise your bio links – keep it clean and natural.
Utilise key influencers – within companies there are those who have power and when they talk, people listen. Utilise these people and the contacts they have.
Attend relevant events – chances are there will be opportunities from the people you meet
PR – think of stories, statistics, research that a journalist would be interested in, get quotes from a CEO that you can include within the content
Many SEO’s have suggested this is going to be a really big update. Everything i’ve have heard in recent weeks backs this up and could be the biggest most impactful algorithm updates we've seen to date.
