Google Penalty World

Barry Schwartz reports on SearchEngineRoundtable: "About a month ago, we polled our readers asking how they were impacted by the Google Penguin update.

We have well over a 1,000 responses and I wanted to share them with you. Keep in mind, those who were negatively impacted are probably more likely to take the poll.

That being said, 65% said they were negatively impacted by Penguin, while only 13% said they were positively impacted.

This is way more than the Panda update where only 40% said they were negatively impacted by the Panda update."

Full article: http://www.seroundtable.com/penguin-poll-15207.html 

Robin Good: Google is about to release globally and for all languages a new algorithm change that will significantly penalize web sites utilizing "black hat" 

SEO techniques, to rank inside Google search engine result pages.

From the article: "In the next few days, Google will be launching an important algorithm change targeted at webspam.

The change will decrease rankings for sites that are violating Google’s existing quality guidelines.

This algorithm represents another improvement in Google efforts to reduce webspam and promote high quality content. 

...

Sites affected by this change might not be easily recognizable as spamming without deep analysis or expertise, but the common thread is that these sites are doing much more than white hat SEO; we believe they are engaging in webspam tactics to manipulate search engine rankings.

The change will go live for all languages at the same time.

For context, the initial Panda change affected about 12% of queries to a significant degree; this algorithm affects about 3.1% of queries in English to a degree that a regular user might notice. The change affects roughly 3% of queries in languages such as German, Chinese, and Arabic, but the impact is higher in more heavily-spammed languages. For example, 5% of Polish queries change to a degree that a regular user might notice."

Read the full article: http://insidesearch.blogspot.it/2012/04/another-step-to-reward-high-quality.html 

From the original article: "Google has been working on a new penalty that targets site’s that overly optimize for search engines for the past few months.

Matt Cutts said the new over optimization penalty will be introduced into the search results in the upcoming month or next few weeks.

The purpose is to “level the playing field,” Cutts said. To give sites that have great content a better shot at ranking above sites that have content that is not as great but do a better job with SEO."

Check also out this video from Matt Cutts, dating back to 2009, and illustrating how much Google's take on this issue has profoundly changed, if not reversed altogether. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bz0KQNPDUoc

Must listen-to. 8/10

Here is a full text trasncription (and the audio recording) of what Matt Cutts has exactly said: http://selnd.com/FTwher 

Check also: http://www.seroundtable.com/google-over-seo-update-14887.html