Penguin 3 Will Affect International Search Queries

Thanks to the recently released SEO updates, webmasters are experiencing an early Halloween this year. They have witnessed Panda 20 and EMD updates at the end of September, but it was just the beginning. On 5th October Matt Cutts tweeted that Google has launched a data refresh of the Penguin algorithm and it will affect search queries all over the world.

However, the impact of this update won’t be as much as the first update. According to Matt, 0.3% English, 0.4% Spanish, 0.4% of French and 0.3% of Italian queries will get affected.

The very first Penguin update was pushed on 24 April and affected 3.1% search queries. The main goal of the first version was to clean link and content spamming, and it did its job perfectly. Later Google released another data refresh on 26 May that influenced merely 01% English search results. Therefore, the 5th October data refresh can be technically called Penguin 3 and its impact is certainly more than the last version.

Matt Cutts uses the term “noticeably affected” during SEO updates and this time he revealed what that exactly means. According to him, “noticeable” means “above the fold” or top 5 results. He said, replacing the current top 10 results with another set of top 10 for a particular keyword is not a wise seo services strategy because users pay more attention to top 5.

Let’s wait and see what Google has in store for SEO experts in coming months.