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Ben Hollom – Marketing Director, M2 Bespoke
By Ben Hollom
Rumours broke out last week that the next Google Penguin update was underway, just as many SEO marketers reported a sudden drop in rankings, the Beanstalk website reported. Whatever the reason for the drops were, it was not down to Penguin, according to Google´s head of spam Matt Cutts.
Cutts stated on Twitter that the next changes to the Penguin algorithm were not taking place at the moment, so that was not what affected search rankings. “Nope, no new Penguin update this week,” he posted and added shortly after “…we do expect to roll out Penguin 2.0 (next generation of Penguin) sometime in the next few weeks though.”
The new Penguin update has been causing concern among SEO marketers ever since news regarding its launch came out in March. The anticipation has been fuelled by the fact that Cutts himself referred to it as “major” and “one of the most talked about Google updates of the year.”
The first Penguin was launched in April last year and has gone through two updates so far – in May and October. According to a study that looked into how these updates affected sites, the hardest blow was taken by pages that had too much exact match anchor text and websites whose link profiles appeared unnatural to Google, Search Engine Watch reported.
Over the past few months, Google has been particularly strict when it comes to unnatural links, so webmasters need to pay special attention to link profiles in order to avoid penalties for spam, the website noted.
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