Matt Cutts, the head of the webspam team of Google, has recently announced the launch of a new update to the Penguin spam fighting algorithm. The first version of Penguin was launched in April 2012, and then two unnumbered updates came out in the same year. Penguin 2.0, actually the fourth major version was launched in May 2013, and version 2.1 is now the latest update, officially dated October 4, 2013.
So, what does Penguin 2.1 do? Google doesn’t say too much – the link in Matt Cutts’s tweet just goes to the original Google blog post in 2012 explaining the launch of the first version. Fighting spam that is, with Penguin 2.1 affecting about 1% of all searches to a noticeable degree.
Penguin is the spam-filtering part of the overall Hummingbird search ranking algorithm, announced recently. If your website has been affected by the latest update, you might consider looking into the link profile, and disavow bad links in Webmaster tools or remove them manually.
