Before the Penguin update, Google would handle links it considered to be webspam to pass down zero link juice value to the pages they linked to.
Has The Penguin Gone Crazy?
Penguin 1.0 goes crazy leaving SEO forums in chaos.
If you visited online marketing forums, right after Penguin 1.0 was released – you would have seen several threads that went into pages and pages of innocent people who got slapped by the crazy Penguin.
It Don’t Matter if You’re Black or White
The Penguin 1 and 2 updates have hit sites that have used black hat or white hat tactics.
Many quality sites that have been playing it safe and by the Google rules have been caught in the crossfire.
Google Penguin Update – The Story So Far
24th April 2012 has been marked as the day SEO changed forever.
On this day, Google rolled out the initial version of its Penguin update in an attempt to rampage against so called “web spam”.
Brace Thyself! The Army of Penguins is Here
Google expects us to abandon other business growth opportunities and try to spend time to figure out what needs to be fixed in our backlink profiles every time they change things around.
Penguin 2.0 Update – Initial Observations and Notes
Penguin 2.0 was released on 22nd May 2013 and affected 2.3% of English queries.
Here are some initial observations and notes on Penguin 2.0
Classification of the Quality of Various Backlinks
Below a quick classification of some link types and their quality in the post penguin-panda world. Having excessive thin directory links even if from trusted sites could damage your “trust”.