What was released?
According to Matt Cutts Twitter account it was confirmed at 11:56pm on May 25th that the Google Penguin 1.1 update was released. 
What did it effect?
Supposedly this update only impacted less than 0.1 percent of English searches. So this definitely wasn’t a big update. This was more of a tweak then an update in my opinion. After doing some research very little has changed. One thing I did notice is some of the bigger sites appeared to have recovered some. I also noticed many of the sites I researched fixed the problems by eliminating on site SEO spam. Learn more about the first Google Penguin update here.
How to recover?
- Remove the spam. There is no need to repeat the keyword 2,000 times on the page, Google understands the theme, spend more time building quality themed content and less time filling it with keywords.
- Footer links are losing value. No need to keyword stuff you footer with a hundred backlinks, this is actually hurting your website. Instead focus on the most important sections on your website, focus the juice there and give yourself a quality meaningful contextual link within the copy. Use your website’s power to rank your website.
- Paid links. Be very careful in this arena, it’s not a good practice. Read Google’s Guideline on paid links. Keep in mind if the website openly sells text links, Google probably knows.
- Blog commenting and guest posts. Used to be the easiest way to rank sites, now it’s becoming a thing of the past. I completely disagree with Google penalizing a site for these types of links. It’s very easy for a competitor to build these backlinks and tank your site with the new update. Although Google says that’s not true, I am sure it is.
- Article marketing is dead. Use your website to hold your content. Article sharing websites are lame, they bring no value to your site. Keep the content original and on your own site, this will give you the best bang for your buck.
- Link wheels. In my opinion these were dumb to begin with. Creating a link wheel let’s anyone come in at any point and clearly see that all the links are pushing each other. Just like a house of cards if you remove a link on the bottom or in the middle the whole thing comes down.