1. 225 N. Michigan Ave., 8th Floor, Chicago, IL 60601 | www.ResolutionMedia.com | (P) 312.980.1600
POV: Google Penguin Updates
What the Penguin and Penguin 2.0 Updates Mean For You
Background
One of the reason’s Google has become the dominant
search engine is through their continued fight against
attempts to manipulate its ranking signals through link
farms, paid links and other forms of link spam.
In April 2012, Google launched the “Penguin Update,”
thought by many to be the most significant algorithm
update to combat false signals in its ranking algorithm,
specifically the web spam backlinks that attempt to
game the system by presenting false quality signals to
Google’s ranking algorithm.
On Thursday May 23, 2013, Google launched Penguin 2.0
— the first major algorithm update to Penguin.
How it Works
The first Google Penguin sought to identify webspam and decrease the
rankings for sites that they believed were violating Google’s quality
guidelines. Upon launch, this update affected more than 600 million
queries. As Penguin proved successful, Google expanded the update to
include even more queries.
In conjunction with this update, Google launched advanced webmaster
messaging to better communicate with site owners if their websites are in
danger of becoming removed from the index due to ill-gotten links. A
“Disavow Link” tool for webmasters was also launched to help
webmasters dissociate their sites from identified spam links.
After more than a year of algorithm tweaks, Google announced they
were releasing the next generation Penguin update that would go much
deeper than the original Penguin update. Whereas the first Penguin

2. 225 N. Michigan Ave., 8th Floor, Chicago, IL 60601 | www.ResolutionMedia.com | (P) 312.980.1600
update focused more on webspam directed towards homepages,
Penguin 2.0 broadened the attack against spammy links toward entire
sites. Penguin 2.0 will affect many more SEOs and webmasters than the
first generation version. Sites that were affected negatively by the first
Penguin update were probably hit even harder by Penguin 2.0.
Resolution POV
1) Short cuts often do not provide long-term benefit. Many SEO efforts,
including link building and creating original content, are time-
consuming and can take weeks to implement. Many webmasters
who sought quick-hit solutions found themselves heavily punished
by Google upon the release of Penguin and Penguin 2.0. It has
been proven to be a far more scalable, effective and long-term
strategy to employ a strategy that adheres to Google’s quality
guidelines.
2) Content remains king. One of the most effective strategies to
remain “valuable” in Google’s eyes is to provide fresh, original
content consistently. More content means more organic links to
your content. If Google sees that there’s genuine interested in your
original content through links, they’ll rank your site higher.
3) Determine your own fate. As part of Penguin 2.0, Google released a
form to report spammy sites that Penguin missed. It’s more
important than ever to make sure that someone is monitoring
webmaster tools for unnatural link messages from Google. Any
abnormal links clearly violating Google’s guidelines should be
reported.
Summary
To improve a website’s position in search engines, the optimizer should
seek to create high value content and syndicate that content to creators
in conjunction with Google’s quality guidelines. This is more important than
ever with the Penguin update that eliminated a lot of spammy content
from Google’s search results. At Resolution, our approach has always
been and will be ethical in nature and firmly within Google and other
search engine’s best practice recommendations.

3. 225 N. Michigan Ave., 8th Floor, Chicago, IL 60601 | www.ResolutionMedia.com | (P) 312.980.1600
For more information, visit the resources below:
Launch announcement from Google (4.24.2012)
How WPMU.org Recovered from Penguin (3.28.2012)
Google Quality Guidelines
Search Engine Land Recap of Disavow Link Tools (10.16.2012)
Penguin Spam Report (5.23.2013)
Penguin 2.0 launch announcement from Matt Cutts (5.22.2013)