How to deal with Penguin 2.0.

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Digest...

A problem with Penguin 3.0 is that our expectations are incredibly high. We assume that, after waiting more than a year, the latest Penguin update will hit hard and will include both a data refresh and an algorithm update. That’s just an assumption, though. I firmly believe that Penguin 1.0 had a much broader, and possibly much more negative, impact on SERPs than Google believed it would, and I think they’ve genuinely struggled to fix and update the Penguin algorithm effectively.

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My beliefs aside, Pierre Far tried to clarify Penguin 3.0’s impact on Oct 21, saying that it affected less than 1% of US/English queries, and that it is a “slow, worldwide rollout”. Interpreting Google’s definition of “percent of queries” is tough, but the original Penguin (1.0) was clocked by Google as impacting 3.1% of US/English queries. Pierre also implied that Penguin 3.0 was a data “refresh”, and possibly not an algorithm change, but, as always, his precise meaning is open to interpretation.

Nothing in our data suggests that Penguin 3.0 was a major update, but our data is just one window on the world. If you were hit by Penguin 3.0 (or if you received good news and recovered) then nothing I can say matters, and it shouldn’t.