Matt Cutts (head of web spam at Google) released a video yesterday (sporting a cool Firefox shirt) giving some hints about Penguin 2.0 which will be coming in the next couple months.

It goes into detail about some of the things that they are working on and it sounds great to ‘white hat’ guys like us (but bad for the link buying page rank flowing black hat guys).

With Penguin 2.0, Google is looking to reward webmasters that run a great site that users love. The type that when they tell their friends (and those friends tell others), they book mark them and visit them often.

Remember in the 90s when every site had a “bookmark us” link? Get ready to see that again as I’m thinking since they probably have the ability to get bookmarking stats from their chrome browser, they’ll probably use it to see who is bookmarking what.

High quality content is still what you should be working on. You’ve made a website – make it something you can pour your heart into and try to create new, useful content every couple/few days to keep things fresh.

By doing this, you should see Google scanning your pages more often (you can check this in Google Webmaster Tools; Health –> Index Status) and see an increase in search queries and clicks.
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One thing Matt said a number of times is that Penguin 2.0 is going to be concentrating a lot more on finding paid links that flow page rank to other sites.

If you have links on your site to other sites, make sure you are using the nofollow attribute. 2.0 is more comprehensive than Penguin 1.0 in this respect and it expects to go deeper and have a bigger impact on link spammers.

He also touched on advetorials (an advertisement in the form of an editorial). He stated that while all advetorials are not bad necessarily, some violate Google’s quality guidelines.

You want to make sure that if you are taking money for links/ads/advetorials that it is clearly stated so that visitors don’t think its organic or editorial.

There is nothing wrong with native advertising mind you – just be sure that they should not flow pagerank.

Expect Google to go upstream and follow known link spammers to deny value to their sites and to the sites selling link spam. They will be using more sophisticated link analysis checks with this update.

On the other side of things, this summer’s update of Penguin will also concentrate on hacked sites. They are working on ways to detect them better/sooner and are also working on better/different ways to communicate to ‘regular’ webmasters.

They understand that every webmaster doesn’t partake in their webmaster tools, but they’d like to try and make their webmaster tools a kind of ‘one stop shopping’ for webmasters so they can communicate information to them easier.

If you are reading this and haven’t set up webmaster tools for your site(s), then I’d suggest you go do that today some time. There is a wealth of information in there and it can help show you what you are doing right (and wrong) on your site.

We should see some changes in webmaster tools as well – more concrete details about your site(s) including more example URLs to help you diagnose problems.

They are working hard to reward those regular webmasters that work hard – those small/medium sized businesses.

This version of Penguin will also try to detect sites with authority in a specific niche and rank them higher because of it (getting back to bookmarks, quality content, etc..).
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