Google's next index update will have big impact on SEO

Google's Matt Cutts revealed Monday (May 13) that the search engine is close to releasing it's first major revision to its webspam filter internally referred to as "Penguin" (to differentiate it from the previous "Panda" updates that primarily targeted content farms). "We're relatively close to deploying the next generation of Penguin" he said in a Webmaster Video, referring to it as "Penguin 2.0".

The new version which would target "black hat web spam" is said to be "more comprehensive" and "go a little bit deeper and have a little more impact" than the previous release. "Advertorials" are also a target of new "enforcement" of quality guidelines, which was a major target of Panda. 

Cutts mentioned that Google would also be trying to better filter "spammy" keywords (keywords traditionally targeted by spammers, such as "payday loans" and salacious terms targeted by pornography spam), and by preventing link juice from "flowing upstream" back to the websites seeking the traffic.

All of the updates above were referred to as being rolled out "in the next few months" (he also mentioned "Summer"), but some SEOs are already reporting changes in search rank as of today.

Cutts also mentioned development was underway of a "completely different system" that would analyze links with an eye to negating the benefit of linkspam.

Dialing Back Panda's Impact on Content Aggregators

One of the significant impacts of the Panda updates, which were rolled out about 18 months ago, was to severely cripple the ranking of content aggregators...websites that pulled content from other websites and tried to organize it topically. Many of these websites lost 90% or more of their traffic, in effect shutting them down. Cutts said Google was trying to separate legitimate aggregators from content farms, but acknowledged that those sitting on the "grey line" dividing the two camps was difficult.