With the prospect of the latest addition of Google Penguin to become a reality within the next few weeks, it seems that many SEO’s and site owners are speculating towards what could be included into the previous focus of the update in order to warrant the upcoming update being called a “new generation” of Google Penguin.
Amid all of the speculation that methods such as guest blogging will be included in the new update, keeping an eye on the Twitter world seems to have turned out a certainty for what will be added into the update after one SEO asked Matt Cutts to take a look at a site that had been undertaking in comment spam methods to pass equity into their site.
During the conversion Cutts was told of a site that had been making use of the link building method to increase the number of backlinks that the site had pointing into it but it seems that the volumes of links that the offending site had placed into their site was less than low key, triggering one competing SEO to release a video call out of the site that had been effectively spamming comment links all over the web in order to manipulate the search engine rankings.
The comment spam technique being used by the offending site seems to be identical to what you would expect from automated SEO link building software such as SENuke and if you have been drawn into the lure of using tools that conduct a link building campaign like this, you might not want to hear the rest of what was revealed…
Reading the conversation between the SEO and Matt Cutts, it seems that the exposure of the technique being used by the offending site was enough for Cutts to take action on the infringement, revealing that he had passed the site to the manual review team and then later adding that he had spoken with “the engineers” and confirmed that links like these will be “hit hard” in the new version of Google Penguin.
With more information towards what is going to be affected by the release of Google Penguin, we are still to hear anything else that looks as certain to be targeted by the algorithm update but we can sense that there will be a large focus towards the placement of links that are low quality, so that for me personally that means that link directories are set to take another round of punishment (apparent from the obvious few…) and so based on that we advise any one reading this post to take a long, hard look at your backlink profile and to take a proactive approach to maintaining it rather than a reactive one because getting caught up in Penguin could well carry a timely hit to your search engine visibility.
Want to hear more about when Google Penguin is set to hit us? Well here is Matt Cutts giving us a general idea: