At the SES San Francisco meeting last week, Matt Cutts, the Google head of spam search, said that the next update to Penguin is going to be big. In fact, Cutts went so far as to say, ‘you don’t want the next Penguin update,’ and that the next few updates will be ‘jarring and jolting’ for both SEOs and webmasters.
Boy, that sounds really pleasant! We just can’t wait here….
Many experts in the SEO industry have commented that they have never seen such a warning come out of Google in the past. These comments make it sound as if the next Penguin update is going to really hit some SEOs hard. Not that the last one was easy: A survey of the industry found recently that about 65% of SEOs polled said their site was hurt by Penguin. It seems that Penguin hurt more than the earlier Panda update because the former update included more updates on SEO techniques than the latter.
Cutts also stated at SES that Google is in the early stages of Panda, and engineers are incorporating new signals and working to improve the quality of the algorithm. Because of this, it is not surprising that some of the coming Penguin updates are going to take longer than they used to take.
Many industry experts think that the upcoming update is being delayed because of a new tool that is going to be delivered to webmasters first. This tool would allow webmasters to disavow links, which is similar to the Bing disavow tool that was released earlier. This is a tool that some think could help webmasters avoid negative SEO attacks. Also, it could generally help to prevent future penalties on links.
Some in the industry also think that the new Penguin update will keep on penalizing SEOs who engage in black hat tactics, and will benefit those who are currently being outranked by shady SEOs.