Penguin Update: Why Google Wants to Target Webspam in Search Results?

We all are discussing about Panda updates since last year. It was a major search algorithm update by Google in 2011. Again, Google had launched a new algorithm called ‘Penguin Update’ on 24 Apr 2012.

Google is trying to catch people or bots that spam the search results on the web. It can even describe it as Google wants to lock any activities that purposefully try to manipulate search results of Google to get better rankings on search results. Google warns people who go against Google’s quality guidelines. This new update is going to affect 3% of the search results worldwide.   

What is Webspam?

Webspam is an activity of manipulating search index pages. Effectively, it affects in the search results. It’s also known as search spam or spamdexing. It’s of two types: Content Spam and link spam.

Content Spam:

Manipulating content of a page for better rankings comes under content spamming [Please here I meant only black hat techniques] such as keyword stuffing, hidden texts, meta tags stuffing, doorway pages, spinning articles by using one single original post, scraper sites etc…

Link Spam:

The malfunctions that can be done with the links between pages only to get high rankings other than its actual merit. Link farms, hidden links, cookie stuffing, page hijacking, buying expired domains, link exchange communities etc.

I will write a detailed explanation of Webspam in future.

Why Are They Taking Action Now?

Google was fighting against Webspam since long ago.  Google gave many warnings and fought with such spam techniques from the day one of their history. However, still we can see many examples that Webspam remain works.  Hence, they were working against Webspam from a quiet long time.  

According to the latest update, Google believes that 3% impact can happen in the search queries. So what all we have to do is just sit and wait.

Let’s see how much impact that this penguin can make against web spam. Anyway, if Google succeeds on it, then it would be a great encourage for “white hat” SEO guys…