Google Penguin 2.0 - Coming soon

[ditoroin]

There is an interesting article on SEW that Google is going to update Penguin to the next major version - http://bit.ly/15Vkr6O

So what do you think, what should we expect? And also, is there available updated webmaster guidelines?

[ditoroin]

This kind of link building is a real trap. You must pay every month for these links and we all know that soon or later Google finds out how to take down this network. Besides you will loose your money, you risk to be penalized.

[eluviis]

Actually... looking in more detail, it seems the 30% dip in traffic started on May 7, through all my sites. Not May 2, but May 7. Still, more reason to believe it was an algo change and not my SEO software change that cause the dip.

[eluviis]

I've been scratching my head because on May 1st I changed my most important site from Genesis SEO to Yoast Wordpress SEO, in order to have more control. I noticed my rankings fell about 30% since May 2 onwards.

This whole time I was thinking it was the change in SEO plugin. But... Looking at 2 of my other sites that had no plugin change, they have fallen about 30% as well. Looks like there may indeed have been an algo update and this whole time I thought it was my plugin changes that caused the problem.

[FedeEinhorn]

On a "basic" research I did a month ago, I found over 5,000 Website buying sape links, and while checking rankings for say 100 of those, almost all had 1 - 3 first spots on those keywords they were targeting and pagerank of 4+. It seems that Google can't get them down. Matt Cutts tweeted that they were working to take down a pretty huge russian network (I guess it was sape), but some of the sites I researched are still ranking on the first spots with PR 4+ and only using those damn link.

[generalzod]

There are still plenty of people selling SAPE links and they still work. But as a large part of the network is made up of hacked websites, I think Google will target the people at the end of the link rather than the victim website itself, which is probably why it's taking time to crack down on it. It's a targeted penalty rather than an algo update to find & destroy it.

[ditoroin]

It seems that they already did it, I've searched and almost every page with keywords "SAPE link network" has a 0 PR.

[FedeEinhorn]

I really hope they were able to find a way to take down that SAPE link network, which apparently they were working on it.

I see hundreds of quality sites outranked by those link buyers, and all of them go back to sape. HATE THAT!