Google began pushing out its next generation of the Google Penguin webspam algorithm yesterday afternoon (May 22, 2013), and the roll-out is now finished. It’s expected that approximately 2.3% of all English-US queries will be affected. The update has also been pushed out for other languages globally, which is now also complete. The range of Penguin changes varies by country, those nations that have greater amounts of webspam will feel a greater impact then countries with less junkie online content.
While the SEO industry is calling this latest release Penguin 4, it’s not a completely new algorithm but rather an update. That said, Google has begun referring to this most recent change internally as Penguin 2.0.
Previous Penguin Updates
Google has a history of releasing their new algorithms in an incremental manner. Hopefully, each update makes their algorithm better but the constant changes are not so good for those concerned with SEO.
The Penguin update list so far:
Penguin 1 on April 24, 2012 (impacting ~3.1% of queries)
Penguin 2 on May 26, 2012 (impacting less than 0.1%)
Penguin 3 on October 5, 2012 (impacting ~0.3% of queries)
Penguin 4 on May 22, 2013 (impacting 2.3% of queries)
