Google Releases Penguin Update 1.1

Google’s Matt Cutts announced the news a short time ago on Twitter, calling it a “data refresh” that impacts less than one-tenth of a percent of English-language searches.

For the past few weeks, we have been reporting on speculation in the forums that Google released a Panda refresh. The Penguin 1.1 update is now officially live.

No matter that it’s late Friday night on the start of a three-day holiday weekend in the U.S., Google has just pushed out the first update to its recent webspam-fighting Penguin algorithm. Let’s call it Penguin 1.1.

Google’s Matt Cutts announced the news a short time ago on Twitter, calling it a “data refresh” that impacts less than one-tenth of a percent of English-language searches.

Although webmasters and SEOs have been speculating consistently in recent weeks that Google had already pushed out a Penguin update (or several), Cutts specifically says this is the first update since Penguin launched back on April 24th.

Google has described Penguin as an algorithm change that’s aimed at webspam and, more specifically, “sites that we believe are violating Google’s quality guidelines.”

Penguin led to immediate outcries from across the SEO industry, with many questioning if it made search results better or worse. Because it’s an algorithmic change, Google said it wouldn’t consider reconsideration requests made via Webmaster Central, but it did setup a form for webmasters to use if they believe Penguin had hit their sites by mistake.

Even though tonight’s update affects a small percentage of English searches, that form is still online.

For more about the Penguin update, see the articles listed below.

Postscript From Danny Sullivan: In the comments below, you’ll see some people wondering if they haven’t recovered from this update, does that means they’ll never recover and should start over. I’d wait a bit longer before that.

After Penguin 1.0 came out, Google said that anyone hit by that had been penalized. But soon after, there were examples of sites that didn’t appear to be spamming Google but which yet had traffic drops.

A few of these might have been false positives, but it’s far more reasonable to assume that when Google wiped out wide swathes of links, some sites that used to benefit from those links lost credit. In other words, they weren’t penalized — they just didn’t get as much credit as before.

I’m still trying to get Google to confirm this or not, if everyone hit by Penguin 1.0 was really penalized or if there were some who just don’t get as much credit as before, because others were penalized. Stay tuned.

Source- searchengineland.com

Google Panda 3.3 Update

Google has confirmed that a new Panda update was rolled out in the last week of February, 2012. Along with 40 improvements pushed to the filter, it is expected that this update will have a lasting influence on sites who practice unethical link building. In their official blog post, Google has clearly mentioned that they are teetotally turning off a method of link analysis that was being used for several years. The link analysis algorithm is now re-constructed and Google is now stressing more on traditional algorithmic ranking factors.

Hortly after the search industry recapped the 1st year of the Google Panda, Google has confirmed that they have rolled out the Panda 3.3. This confirmation by the search engine came in with its announcement of 40 more search updates that happened in February.

Google has placed the Panda Update much lower in the list, but we are bringing it right to the top for you. Quoting Google on the Panda update: “This launch refreshes data in the Panda system, making it more accurate and more sentient to recent changes on the web.”

Google has confirmed a new Panda update at the same time that it’s announcing 40 search updates that happened in February (or are in progress right now). It would be all but impossible to fully sum up the full slate of changes here, but there are a few that seem especially noteworthy and will no doubt produce a lot of speculation among search marketers. Here’s a look at the ones that stand out to me:

Everyone knew that Google Panda update was going on and the update of Google Panda 3.3 has been stared from this Monday. Google said that in new Google Panda 3.3 there have been 20 search qualities changes.

So, the update that took place on February 27th does not have any new or changed ranking signals. Quite like the Panda 3.2, this was again a ‘refresh’ update.

1. Disabling two old fresh query classifiers. (Launch codename “MANGO”), project codename “Freshness” As search evolves and new signals and classifiers are applied to rank search results, sometimes old algorithms get outdated. This improvement disables two old classifiers related to query freshness.

2. Improvements to ranking for local search results. (Launch Codename “VENICE”) This improvement improves the triggering of Local Universal results by relying more on the ranking of our main search results as a signal.

3. More accurate detection of official pages. (Launch Codename “WRE”) We’ve made an adjustment to how we detect official pages to make more accurate identifications. The result is that many pages that were previously misidentified as official will no longer be.

4. Link evaluation. We often use characteristics of links to help us figure out the topic of a linked page. We have changed the way in which we evaluate links; in particular, we are turning off a method of link analysis that we used for several years. We often rearchitect or turn off parts of our scoring in order to keep our system maintainable, clean and understandable.

5. Improvements to travel-related searches. (Launch Codename “NESEHORN”) We’ve made advancement to triggering for a polymorphism of flight-related search queries. These changes improve the user experience for our Flight Search feature with users getting more accurate flight results.

Here are some of the other Google updates:

More coverage for related searches.

International launch of shopping rich snippets.

“Site:” query update.

Tweak to categorizer for expanded sitelinks.

Data refresh for related searches signal.

Improvements to English spell correction.

There have been freshness and web history updates too.

Improved detection for SafeSearch in Image Search.