Matt Cutts, Head of Google’s Webspam team has today announced some changes that are coming into play with the launch of Google Penguin 2 update this summer (as early as May).
The message was consistently clear from Matt, Google’s advice is for webmasters to produce great sites that have excellent content. Matt specifically mentioned bookmarking and repeat visits, so it is possible that Penguin 2.0 gives greater weight to those sites that encourage repeat visiting.
He also indicated that they were working on ensuring that those sites that are authoritative on a particular subject rank better, and they will also attempt to soften any penalties that were imposed in Penguin 1.0. He mentioned sites that occupy the grey area will perhaps see a higher ranking if they have some positive signals.
those sites that currently occupy the grey area carry a softer penalty than perhaps that was dished out by Penguin 1.0.
Matt gave some goods advice regarding advertorial listings that violate Google’s quality guidelines. Google are working on tweaking their algorithm to ensure that those sites with advertorial content or paid adverts, do not pass pagerank.
Lastly, Matt shared some useful updates that are coming regarding hacked sites and malware. He indicated that Google is becoming better at detecting such sites, and with the updates, communicating with webmasters will improve. He mentioned that more help will be given to webmasters to overcome hacked sites, including a specific area in Webmaster Tools that provide useful URLs that will help webmasters diagnose problems on their sites.
