A Google spokesperson tells WebProNews: “There hasn’t been an update since the first one.”

It doesn’t get any clearer than that.

Of course, one Googler recently said that Google didn’t even have anything called Penguin, so I guess you can never be 100% sure.

That said, I’m pretty confident that this particular Googler is right. Even the speculation about the possible update has been mixed. Some are attributing traffic dips to the holiday weekend.

There’s also the fact that Google makes changes every day. We should soon be seeing the big list for the month of May.

In the meantime, you’d probably do well to focus on making your site and content as good as they can be, and keep it all within Google’s quality guidelines. Also, try to make sure if you hire an agency to do your SEO, that they’re not engaging in any paid linking on your behalf.

You can still expect Penguin to be coming back around sooner or later.

White hat search marketers read and follow Google Guidelines. What should they tell clients whose competitors use black hat techniques (such as using doorway pages) and whom continue to rank as a result of those techniques?

Do you you think Google does a good job catching webspam? Let us know in the comments.

“So first and foremost, I would say do a spam report, because if you’re violating Google’s guidelines in terms of cloaking or sneaky JavaScript redirects, buying links, doorway pages, keyword stuffing, all those kinds of things, we do want to know about it,” he says. “So you can do a spam report. That’s private. You can also stop by Google’s Webmaster forum, and that’s more public, but you can do a spam report there. You can sort of say, hey, I saw this content. It seems like it’s ranking higher than it should be ranking. Here’s a real business, and it’s being outranked by this spammer…those kinds of things.”

He notes that are both Google employees and “super users” who keep an eye on the forum, and can alert Google about issues.

“The other thing that I would say is if you look at the history of which businesses have done well over time, you’ll find the sorts of sites and the sorts of businesses that are built to stand the test of time,” says Cutts. “If someone is using a technique that is a gimmick or something that’s like the SEO fad of the day, that’s a little less likely to really work well a few years from now. So a lot of the times, you’ll see people just chasing after, ‘OK, I’m going to use guest books’, or iI’m going to use link wheels’ or whatever. And then they find, ‘Oh, that stopped working as well.’ And sometimes it’s because of broad algorithmic changes like Panda. Sometimes it’s because of specific web spam targeted algorithms.”

I’m sure you’ve heard of Penguin.

He references the JC Penney and Overstock.com incidents, in which Google took manual action. For some reason, he didn’t bring up the Google Chrome incident.

This is actually a pretty timely video from Cutts, as another big paid linking controversy was uncovered by Josh Davis (which Cutts acknowledged on Twitter). Google ended up de-indexing the SEO firm involved in that.

“So my short answer is go ahead and do a spam report,” Cutts continues. “You can also report it in the forums. But it’s definitely the case that if you’re taking those higher risks, that can come back and bite you. And that can have a material impact.”

He’s not joking about that. Overstock blamed Google for “an ugly year” when its revenue plummeted. Even Google’s own Chrome penalty led to some questions about the browser’s market share.

Cutts notes that Google is also happy to get feedback at conferences, on Twitter, online, blogs, forums, “if you’re seeing sites that are prospering and are using black hat techniques.”

“Now, it’s possible that they have some low-quality links, and there are some links that people aren’t aware of that we see that are actually high quality,” Cutts notes. “But we’re happy to get spam reports. We’re happy to dig into them. And then we’ll try to find either new algorithms to try to rank the things more appropriately in the future. Or we’re certainly willing to take manual action on spam if it’s egregious or if it violates our guidelines. We have a manual web spam team that is willing to respond to those spam reports.”

According to Cutts, you can even submit spam reports using Google Docs. Here’s a conversation he had on Twitter recently:

After Google launched the Penguin update, Cutts tweeted the following about post-Penguin spam reports:

Shortly thereafter, he tweeted:

I’m sure plenty more reports have rolled into Google since then, but it does seem like they process them fairly quickly.

Do you think Google has done a good job at cleaning up webspam? Share your thoughts.

Now, it turns out that iAcquire has been de-indexed from Google (along with other parties involved in the scandal, according to Search Engine Land’s Barry Schwartz). Schwartz even got iAcquire’s Director of Inbound Marketing to mention this on Twitter:

On the topic of whether or not its better for companies to run their own SEO in-house, Davis told WebProNews, “It is hard to say. From small businesses all the way up to large corporations there are so many hours in the day. SEO seems to be one area where considerable oversight is needed as various black and grey hat techniques still seem to be part of some SEO companies’ toolboxes.”

As far as trust a firm not to engage in paid linking on your behalf, Davis says, “Backlink monitoring is certainly a key. There are a number of enterprise grade resources that provide daily updates on links. In my case I was just using a crude, free backlink service, but this space is filled with vendors who offer high quality monitoring. Having a third party do an audit of links might also be needed when a large company’s reputation is at stake.”

As usual, webmasters are speculating about the latest big name Google algorithm change as some have experienced sudden traffic issues. This has happened quite frequently since last year’s Panda update was launched. Sometimes it was Panda, and other times it wasn’t.

Now, there is talk in the WebmasterWorld forum that there may have been another Penguin update. We’ve reached out to Google for confirmation one way or another, and will update accordingly.

In one forum thread, member Tedster writes, “A number of members who were hit by Penguin are now reporting some movement in various threads. Can anyone else see evidence of a Penguin refresh?”

Some are seeing lower traffic, but assuming it’s because of the coming holiday weekend. However, user Anteck writes, “Getting loads of zombie traffic, suddenly the majority of visitors arnt converting. Googles up to something. All Australian sites. No holidays here.”

There is also some speculation that the Knowledge Graph came into play. Member Rasputin writes:

I would say that our ‘penguin’ sites recovered a few % around the 19th May while non-penguin sites fell a similar amount at the same time (no changes made – they are mostly old, small sites), but the variation after a few days is small enough that it could possibly just be seasonal variation.

It is also possible that the introduction of Knowledge Graph is distorting the figures for our (travel) sites that fell a small amount around the same time (or the sunny weather in the UK could have got people away from their computers…)

Google, by the way, appears to consider Knowledge Graph one of its crowning achievements. CEO Larry Page was sure talking it up this past week.

Either way, it’s put a little less emphasis on Google+ profiles for some search results, though it’s still thrusting them in the spotlight for others (like Mark Zuckerberg’s).

It’s hard to believe, but here we are close to the end of May already. Before too long, we should be seeing a new giant list of Google algorithm updates for the past month.

Image: The Batman Season 4 Episode 2 (Warner Bros.)

Still, the whole thing is a pretty interesting story, and we’ve had a conversation with Davis on the subject that is still worth sharing. The whole thing even caught the attention of Matt Cutts, Google’s head of webspam:

The whole thing started when Davis was sent an email from a third party offering to pay him for placing a link to one of the company’s pages. Davis determined that this third party was linked to “a prominent enterprise Search Engine Optimization (SEO) company,” which would lead one to believe that it is part of the efforts of the SEO agency the main company (the beneficiary of the link) had hired.

I’m not going to rehash the entire thing here. If you want to know more about it, I suggest reading Davis’ report, but the whole thing raises some questions about hiring outside agencies to do your SEO. Google even had to penalize itself when a marketing agency had solicited paid links for Google’s Chrome browser. Google’s Chrome landing page suffered a 60-day penalty. Questions were raised about how this may have impacted Chrome’s market share.

Google takes this stuff seriously (even if the lines around paid links are blurry at times).

Davis tells WebProNews it’s difficult to tell if these links help the company at hand. “If you look around the [company's] site you will see that they have extensive onsite SEO optimization. They also have the advantage of businesses websites placing a [company] badge which links back to [company].”

“That said, some of their subpages don’t have many inbound links which may be the point of hiring an agency to do offsite SEO,” he adds.

We asked Davis if he thinks there is a lot more of this paid linking for big companies going on than most people realize.

“I think it is pretty dangerous to do paid backlinking explicitly for a large company, but I have come across some other smaller companies which seem to be doing it (maybe one other large one, but I am still researching that),” Davis tells us. “At 3000+ words I wasn’t about to try to tackle other companies, but it is possible it is going on.”

One might wonder if in-house SEO is the way to go, if it’s SEO companies responsible for engaging in paid linking on behalf of clients, without the clients knowing. There are surely many, many white hat SEO companies out there that would never do this, but how does a business know that they won’t be getting something like this?

“It is hard to say,” says Davis. “From small businesses all the way up to large corporations there are so many hours in the day. SEO seems to be one area where considerable oversight is needed as various black and grey hat techniques still seem to be part of some SEO companies’ toolboxes.”

As far as trust, Davis says, “Backlink monitoring is certainly a key. There are a number of enterprise grade resources that provide daily updates on links. In my case I was just using a crude, free backlink service, but this space is filled with vendors who offer high quality monitoring. Having a third party do an audit of links might also be needed when a large company’s reputation is at stake.”

The company in question, according to emails Davis received, is looking into the situation further. Something tells me that Google is too.

Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land shares an amusing story about how one Googler claimed that Google had no such thing. While he doesn’t share any names, he indicates that someone who worked for Google was asked about the Penguin update, and pointed towards some search results on the topic, and responded:

“I assure you 100% that there has been nothing at Google referred to as ‘Penguin.’…If you notice on those search results you sent me, not a single source is from Google itself…From what I just saw on this whole Penguin thing–it sounds to me like a lot of SEO companies that use shady and unethical practices are upset that their loop holes have been cut out!”

Google announced the update, which came to be known as Penguin, on 04/24, in a blog post titled, “Another Step To Reward High-Quality Sites“. This appeared to be the update Google’s Matt Cutts “sort of pre-announced” at SXSW. The update was being called the “Webspam update” at first, but then, in a conversation Sullivan had with Google, he revealed that it was called Penguin.

Right around that time, Cutts also tweeted this picture:

Of course Googlers like Cutts and Amit Singhal have openly discussed the Penguin update. In fact, both have even indicated that it has been a success.

At SMX London, Singhal engaged in a keynote interview with Sullivan, and mentioned that nobody at Google understands everything at Google. I guess that is being illustrated pretty well here.

Lead Image: cheezburger.com

In light of all the link warnings Google has been sending out, and the Penguin update, a lot of webmasters are freaking out about their link profiles, and want to eliminate any questionable links that might be sending Google signals that could lead to lower rankings.

A user submitted the following question to Cutts:

Site A links to Site B because Site B has content that would be useful to Site A’s end users, and Google indexes the appropriate page. After the page is indexed, Site B’s content changes and becomes spammy. Does Site A incur a penalty in this case?

“OK, so let’s make it concrete,” says Cutts. “Suppose I link to a great site. I love it, and so I link to it. I think it’s good for my users. Google finds that page. Everybody’s happy. Users are happy. Life is good. Except now, that site that I linked to went away. It didn’t pay its domain registration or whatever, and now becomes maybe an expired domain porn site, and it’s doing some really nasty stuff. Am I going to be penalized for that? In general, no.”

“It’s not the sort of thing where just having a few stale links that happen to link to spam are going to get you into problems,” he continues. “But if a vast majority of your site just happens to link to a whole bunch of really spammy porn or off-topic stuff, then that can start to affect your site’s reputation. We look at the overall nature of the web, and certain amount of links are always going stale, going 404, pointing to information that can change or that can become spammy.”

“And so it’s not the case that just because you have one link that happens to go to bad content because the content has changed since you made that link, that you’re going to run into an issue,” he concludes. “At the same time, we are able to suss out in a lot of ways when people are trying to link to abusive or manipulative or deceptive or malicious sites. So in the general case, I wouldn’t worry about it at all. If you are trying to hide a whole bunch of spammy links, then that might be the sort of thing that you need to worry about, but just a particular site that happened to go bad, and you don’t know about every single site, and you don’t re-check every single link on your site, that’s not the sort of thing that I would worry about.”

Of course, a lot more people are worried about negative SEO practices, and inbound links, rather than the sites they’re linking to themselves.

More Penguin coverage here.

The user added a negative parameter for amazon with his keywords, and Google returned his site to pre-Penguin rankings. “For example, he search for [blue widget -amazon] and his rankings pre-Penguin showed up on Google for the query [blue widget],” Schwartz explains.

It didn’t seem very reliable at first, so I didn’t bother to cover it. Even Schwartz noted that it failed on some of the queries he tried. However, the comments on his article have poured in since then, and it sounds like it has worked for quite a few people, so perhaps it’s worth taking a look at.

One commenter notes that other negative keywords seem to work as well, such as “-ebay”.

Remember, if you believe that you were unfairly hit by the Penguin update, Google has a form where you can complain. Of course, it’s likely that Google disagrees. After all, they consider the update to be a success.

View our Penguin coverage here.

We were hoping to get a some in depth discussion about Google’s recent Penguin update, but apparently that wasn’t a major point of conversation. Daniel Waisberg liveblogged the discussion at Search Engine Land, and Penguin only came up briefly. Here’s the relevant snippet of the liveblog:

Danny talks about Penguin and asks how it is going from Google standpoint, are search results better? Amit says that in the end of the day, users will stay with the search engine that provides the most relevant results. Google’s objective was to reward high quality sites and that was a success with Penguin. One of the beauties of running a search engine is that the search engines that can measure best what the users feel is the one that will succeed more.

From Google’s perspective they use any signal that is available for them, more than 200 of them. They have to make sure they are accurate and good. They will use any signal, whether it is organic or not.

Google’s Matt Cutts also recently said that Google has considered Penguin a success, though plenty out there disagree.

If you want Google’s advice on Penguin recovery, check out these videos Matt Cutts says to watch, these tips he endorsed on Twitter, and of course Google’s quality guidelines.

Today, Google announced the Knowledge Graph, which Google is saying makes it smarter at determining what people mean when they’re searching for things. More on the Knowledge Graph here. It also comes in mobile.

Google is indicating that this is a step away from keywords. In the official announcement, SVP, Engineering, Amit Singhal, says:

Take a query like [taj mahal]. For more than four decades, search has essentially been about matching keywords to queries. To a search engine the words [taj mahal] have been just that—two words.

But we all know that [taj mahal] has a much richer meaning. You might think of one of the world’s most beautiful monuments, or a Grammy Award-winning musician, or possibly even a casino in Atlantic City, NJ. Or, depending on when you last ate, the nearest Indian restaurant. It’s why we’ve been working on an intelligent model—in geek-speak, a “graph”—that understands real-world entities and their relationships to one another: things, not strings.

Google’s head of webspam, Matt Cutts, tweeted about the feature:

On Google+, Cutts said, “Google just announced its Knowledge Graph. It’s another step away from raw keywords (without knowing what those words really mean) toward understanding things in the real-world and how they relate to each other. The knowledge graph improves our ability to understand the intent of a query so we can give better answers and search results.”

Keywords have, of course, been a major point of spam, which Google is working hard to eliminate (see Penguin update). The less Google can rely on keywords to deliver relevant results, the less susceptible to spam it should be.

I don’t think the Knowledge Graph has done anything to diminish the value of using relevant keywords in your content, and it doesn’t seem to affect the regular, organic web results, but who knows if this will change somewhere down the line.

It is interesting to see Google continue to clutter up its search results pages, given that its clean design was one of the big differentiators of the search engine in its early days.