Google Penguin 2.0 Goes Deep - But What Does That Mean?

As you know, Penguin 2.0 #4 is live and webmasters and SEOs are buzzing about that. The thing is, some misconceptions about Penguin 2.0 are driving me absolutely crazy.

Matt Cutts, in his video about this update, talks about how Penguin 2.0 will be "more comprehensive," how this version "goes deeper" and will result in "more of an impact" than Penguin 1.0.

The SEO community is translating "goes deeper" to mean that Penguin 1.0 only impacted the home page of a web site. That is absolutely false. Deeper has nothing to do with that. Those who were hit by Penguin 1.0 know all to well that their whole site suffered, not just their home page.

What Matt meant by "deeper" is that Google is going deeper into their index, link graph and more sites will be impacted by this than the previous Penguin 1.0 update. By deeper, Matt does not mean how it impacts a specific web site architecture but rather how it impacts the web in general.

For example, Ross Hudgens tweeted "Penguin 1 targets homepage, 2 goes "much deeper." I said back no and ended at that. But he and others did not get it. The Webmaster World thread has webmasters confused about it also, where someone said "I don't understand this idea that Penguin 1.0 just looked at the home page." You are right, it is completely wrong to think that way.

Normally I don't get heated up about misconceptions in the industry - but seriously.

Update: I see now where the confusion comes from, via TWIG, right over here where Matt said Penguin looks at the home page of the site. Matt must mean Penguin only analyzed the links to the home page. But anyone who had a site impacted by Penguin noticed not just their home page ranking suffer. So I think that is the distinction.

A Google Update Is Happening (Google: Nothing To Announce Now)

An ongoing WebmasterWorld has a huge uptick in chatter around major ranking and search result fluctuation over the night. It seems from this and from all the complaints in the Google Webmaster Help forums that there is indeed some sort of update going on.

Is it Penguin, Panda, EMD, page layout or something else - or is it a wide-spread manual action or Google going after and devaluing a major link network - I do not know. But it does seem something has happened causing tons of webmasters and SEOs to take to the forums to complain.

This is fairly common days after I see an update brewing as I reported on Tuesday. It does seem like something is indeed rolling out and hopefully you guys benefited from it.

SERPs.com, SERP metrics and MozCast have all shown higher than normal Google fluctuation activity over the past few days as well.

Here are some comments from the WebmasterWorld thread over night:

Sure fire sign of a major update...

Seeing GIGANTIC drops this morning, woke up to 200 visitors over night, should be around 1200 by now. Server is fine. Europe appears to be asleep

Plus, as I said, there is a huge number of complaints from individual webmasters in theGoogle Webmaster Help forums.

So there seems to be a Google update happening. I will ping Google and see if I can get anything on the record. Stay tuned...

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Update: A Google spokesperson gave me a generic non-statement that reads:

We have nothing to announce at this time. We make over 500 changes to our algorithms a year, so there will always be fluctuations in our rankings in addition to normal crawling and indexing.

Google Update Brewing? May 2013

There are some very early signs of a possible Google update brewing as of early this morning. AWebmasterWorld thread has some renewed chatter around an update.

Note, most of the WebmasterWorld thread is about April 15th changes, which people say have to do with the Boston bombings and seasonal traffic changes. But last night, early this morning, two webmasters came in and said they saw major shifts in rankings and traffic.

A preferred WebmasterWorld member said he saw a 77% drop just yesterday. Others said "some thing big is underway," after noting drops in his keyword ranking.

SERPs.com reports pretty significant changes in he Google results on Monday. SERPMetrics.com shows very little change in the search results. MozCast has not yetupdated with results from Monday but they showed changes on Sunday, which seem off.

It is very early and nothing is confirmed - but there may be signs of a possible Google update. What exactly, is still unknown and unconfirmed.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.