Google Penguin 2.0 algorithm update launched in last week of May 2013 hit the sites having unnatural links in their backlink profile. Google webspam team targeted the sites having bad links not only to home page but also to the sub pages.
Matt Cutts Google spam team head in an interview before release of Penguin 2.0 announced that Penguin 1.0 only analyzed your homepage links and not pages deeper on your website and Penguin 2.0 now analyzed deeper pages on the site means internal/sub pages.
Matt Cutts said, “It is a leap. It’s a brand new generation of algorithms. The previous iteration of Penguin would essentially only look at the homepage of a site. The newer generation of Penguin goes much deeper. It has a really big impact in certain small areas.”
From this statement we can conclude that Penguin 1.0 has left many of the websites whose deeper pages has got the unnatural backlinks. Now in latest update, Google targeted all those websites which were saved on first update and the sites which got spammy links to internal pages are hit badly. The fact was earlier not known to the SEO community. Now what is the impact of this deep drilling by Google for manipulative links.
People worked for cleaning of bad links to home page, files disavow got Good email from Google. Penguin 2.0 has put them back into same position because of bad links to Internal pages. For getting ranking back they have to work again on Internal pages now.
All the sites which are using same anchor text for deeper pages are also hit by Penguin 2.0. All types of bad links like low quality directories, duplicate or spinned articles, blogroll links, link networks, bad profile links etc are again targeted by Penguin 2.0
Penguin 2.0 Now What to do
Only one solution is to remove the unnatural links to both home page and deepers pages. Unnatural links to deeper pages means more links to remove. I know the task is too hard to do but not alternative for bad links. Since Google webmaster tool is not providing the complete detail. I will recommend to use the following two additional automatic tools: The Screaming Frog SEO Spider and Deep Crawl for back link extracting to all pages of website. Now the solutions is link profile analysis, link pruning and use of Disavow Links Tool in both of the following cases.
- If you have already carried out link pruning exercise and again hit by Google Penguin 2.0 you will have to make fresh analysis of link profile of deepers pages and to again start links removal process.
- If you have escaped Google Penguin 1.0 and hit in by latest update, you will have to do the complete backlinks audit of home page and internal pages and start link removing.
I know it is a hard task to extract thousands of links, doing manual link audits, finding contact point for bad linking sites, link removal email outreach, preparing disavow files and at last reconsideration at Google door. Therefore Keep calm and carry on cleaning your backlink profile.