Penguin 4, With Penguin 2.0 Generation Spam-Fighting, Is Now Live

Penguin 4, With Penguin 2.0 Generation Spam-Fighting, Is Now Live

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, Google’s head of search spam, announced during This Week in Google, Episode #199, the new Penguin 2.0 update. Matt referenced the video of him talking about the next generation Penguin update. Matt said this is being rolled out “within the next few hours.”

Webmasters and SEOs, expect major changes to the search results. Matt specifically said, 2.3% of english queries will be impacted by this update.
Matt Cutts later posted on his blog some more details about this roll out. Matt explained there was an international roll out as well, saying the “change has also finished rolling out for other languages world-wide.” How much of an impact depends on the “languages with more webspam,” i.e. if the French language had more webspam Google France would see a larger impact.

Previous Penguin Updates:

Penguin 4? Penguin 2.0? We could 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 used 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 that the original Penguin update and will impact many more SEOs and webmasters than the first generation version. Here is that video again:
For more on the Google Penguin update, click here.