Matt Cutts of Google announced on his blog that they rolled out Penguin 2.0 and about a week before that he talked about what to expect. Since then there has been a lot of chatter in the SEO community. Some SEOs are just happy that they didn’t get wiped out and others are disappointed that they are still seeing spammy websites at the top of Google’s search results for some competitive phrases. Many of you will be curious about what has really changed, we’ve put together a list of resources to help you diagnose what has changed.
Check SERP Analysis Tools
These tools analyze changes in the search results by monitoring the rankings for many different keywords.
A. SERPmetrics’s SERP Fluctuation tool did detected a big change.
B. SEOmoz’s MozCast Tool detects less domain diversity.
Review Penguin 2.0 Losers
Analyzing the losers can help you identify what Google may or may not be putting more weight on.
SearchEngineLand.com’s List of Losers
“In a nutshell, the list includes: porn sites, game sites and big brands like Dish.com, the Salvation Army, CheapOair and Educational Testing Service (yes, ETS, the company that makes a lot of those standardized tests you probably took as a child).”
linkresearchtools.com Deep Dive into a Penguin 2.0 Victim
“We’ll see a whole new stampede of negative SEO attacks that are really easy to do. All you need is a couple sites that were penalized in the past, and you can buy them en’masse on expired domain networks, and redirect those to your competitors. Nice, ha?”
Use Link Analysis Tools
Analyzing links can help you determin what types of links may be more important to Penguin 2.0. There are many link analysis options… select your weapon of choice.
- opensiteexplorer.org
- majesticseo.com
- ahrefs.com
- linkresearchtools.com
- cognitiveseo.com
- linkdiagnosis.com
- ranksignals.com
- linkdetective.com (requires OSE data)
Review Your Own Website Analytics
There’s no better way to see the effects of a Google update than checking your own Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools accounts (there’s a delay for GWMT data).
Source: barracuda-digital.co.uk
Monitor Discussions
Find out the latest information about Penguin 2.0.
- Follow Matt Cutts on Twitter for Inside Information.
- Penguin 2.0 Tweets
- Google Webmaster Forums
- SEO Discussion Forums
- Inbound.org Community
It’s not perfect and Google knows it
“We can adjust the impact but we wanted to start at one level and then we can modify things appropriately.” – Matt Cutts
Less than 24 hours of announcing the update Google released a Penguin 2.0 Spam Reporting form.
I hope this helps. If you have other sources you’d recommend let us know.