A lot of SEOs and website owners who think they’re in the clear may be in for a hard slap in the face. Google has made it clear that the Penguin ranking & penalty update is far from over. Not only that, there’s a big wave coming in that will shake up things.
Official Google mouthpiece Matt Cutts made this clear at a recent big SEO Conference when asked about whether this latest update was settled in; he made it clear that it wasn’t. Not by a long shot:
“…we’re still in the early stages of Penguin where the engineers are incorporating new signals and iterating to improve the algorithm. Because of that, expect that the next few Penguin updates will take longer, incorporate additional signals, and as a result will have more noticeable impact.”
Other sources have used less diplomatic language so the search world is preparing for something big to come down the pike.
The targets of this update are the link spammers, the kind of SEO practitioners who leave vague comments on blogs with a link to their sites. Something that worked very well for a while, but, like most optimization ‘tricks’, is now being countered as Google gets smarter.
It will be interesting to see who gets caught in this and, unfortunately, some will be innocent victims. If you’re on of them, be patient. Eventually things will clear up and get settled. For now, let’s all keep our fingers crossed.