Yesterday (may 22th 2013) Google’s web spam engineer Matt Cutts announced the official release of the long expected Penguin 2.0 algorithm update. It’s Google attempt to further clean-up it’s SERPS by removing “black hat spam”. It is said to have a significantly larger impact om spam and search results than the original Penguin update.

Now, what are the big no-no’s targeted with this update? As known Penguin updates are mainly focussed on suspicious link-profiles.  So when could a link-profile be labelled ‘suspicious’ ? Google is looking for manipulative/unnatural links in your profile, clear warnings for this are:

• Having too much exact phrase anchor matches in your profile (such as ‘cheap loans’);
• Having a too big percentage of your link-profile exist out of site-wide links;

Ofcourse many other signals are used by Google determining what link-profiles are suspicious but I would say the, last year launched, disavow tool offered Google great insight into websites and linkschema’s selling links. 

Next to the Penguin 2.0 update Google also released an update to it’s Panda algorithm. Google felt too many websites got hit by previous Panda update and is now looking for additional signals for sites that are in the ‘gray area’ and at the same time looking for signals that suggest the website truly is high of high quality. These websites might find themselves on the ‘good’ side again and see an increase in SEO traffic.

Let us know if you’ve seen any significant changes in the comments below