On 4th October 2013 evening Google webspam team head Matt Cutts announced on twitter the news of launching of Google Penguin 2.1 algorithm update which is going to affect 1% search results.

Google Penguin algorithm is just to decrease the ranking of websites which are of low quality or having scrape contents or having low quality bad backlinks. The main aim is to penalise the websites using spam techniques to get higher ranking in search results.

Just to remind first time Penguin was introduced by Google on April 24, 2012 impacting around 3.1% of search queries. Latter on Penguin 2.0 update launched on May 22, 2013 impacting 2.3% of Google search queries. Now latest Google Penguin Update 2.1  seems to less harmful as it only impact 1 % of searchers.

Now question in mind of everyone in search marketing industry what is new in this update I read many of webmaster discussion forum and blogs to how the various websites and webmasters are affected by this update and what is new in this.

Low quality websites or site using spam techniques or buying links again put under manual spam action

• Site which has already cleaned up there bad link profile are back in many cases
• Sites which are having even few bad links are now affected. I have seen sites which are ranking till first penguin update are now badly affected by this update.
• This update also not only consider your homepage but also the internal pages to check spam or back link profile
• Sites which are new and have not bad links are ranking well.

In my opinion Google is decreasing the percentage of bad links to be considered as spam For example in first update if your website has 70% low quality or bad links in your linking profile you are in Google spam rider. In second update if your site has around 50% bad links you are in. Now in this update if you have 25% inorganic links in your link profile you are penalised. This is just an example to understand what is happening, percentage of bad links is just my assumption.

At last Penguin 2.1 is a part of new Google Hummingbird algorithm.

There is a huge swing both way for website owners, webmasters or SEOs. Some websites lost their ranking some website come out of Penguin impact and most have no impact.