Whiteboard+ on Google’s Penguin Update

Posted by randfish

Yesterday, I filmed some quick thoughts on Google’s Penguin update. You can find the full video on our Google+ page:

In it, I cover a few unique items about Penguin:

• It’s (weirdly) not focused on improving search quality
• It appears to affect some of the worst spam (but not all) and some very light forms of spam/manipulation (oddly)
• Not tied to on-page or on-site necessarily, though outlinks may be looked at and several other updates occurred at similar times (making it tough to reverse engineer what might have caused a penalty)
• Appears to affect a disproportionate number of web service industry sites (though that could be correlation, not causation)
• Not yet clear if this a rolling update (though there are signs it may be)
• Left a lot of very strange, “empty” types of results in many of the spammiest verticals/SERPs

I wanted to crosspost about it here so those asking for my opinions about Penguin could check it out. Look forward to some great discussion on G+ (or here in the comments). Oh, and if you haven’t encircled SEOmoz on Google+… You totally should! We’ve got another WB+ video coming out very soon 🙂

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