By Mark Maunder: Provider of our WordPress Security Tools
Matt Cutts is the head of the Google Web Spam team. He is also seen in the SEO community as the SEO spokesman for Google. Today Matt has posted a preview of what is coming in the Penguin 2.0 release, due Summer 2013. Penguin 2.0 is the next major update of Google’s search algorithm and it’s associated tools and applications.
There are a few items related to security so I’m going to outline them below, and then to save you time I’ll give you a summary of the SEO items he mentioned.
The changes coming in Penguin 2.0 update related to security are:
- Improved detection of hacked websites. This probably means your site is more likely to be blacklisted by Google when you are hacked and that it will be blacklisted sooner.
- Improved communication with webmasters when your site is hacked. Currently if you sign into Google Webmaster Tools, you can select to receive a daily digest of issues related to your websites. My guess is that Google is expanding this to offer real-time email alerts when malware is detected on your site or when your site is compromised.
- A possible differentiation between sites that are hacked and sites that serve up malware.
- Better tools to diagnose and clean your hacked website. Matt describes a single place you can go to once your site has been hacked where you can get more information that will help you clean up your site.
- Webmaster Tools will be providing more concrete details and “example URLs” that you can go to to diagnose your site. [No specifics on this]
Other interesting changes related to SEO are:
- Google will still give preference to high quality content that “users love, bookmark, come back to and visit over and over again”. It sounds like repeat visitors may get a higher emphasis with the Penguin 2.0 update.
- They will penalize paid links and paid websites that attempt to boost the ranking of other websites by linking to those other websites. They will be removing any PageRank that those paid sites pass on to the sites they’re trying to promote.
- They are making two algorithm changes that will significantly affect the ranking of sites in sectors that are particularly spammy.
- Penguin 2.0 will do a better job of giving sites who are clearly an authority in their space a higher ranking.
- They will also attempt to soften penalties that were imposed on some sites with the release of Penguin 1.0. Specifically sites that are in a grey area but have some positive signals will see a higher ranking.
The Penguin 2.0 update will be released in Summer of 2013. You can see the full video on Matt’s blog.