The Google Penguin Rumour!

Hi Fellow Warriors,
I went to a charity event this weekend and was on the same table as another full time SEO expert, at least this is what he claimed! He was very quiet so chatting with him was a bit of a struggle, but after a few beers we had a very interesting conversation.

He previously worked for microsoft and this initially helped him with his conversion to full time seo, but I was more interested in the Penguin update from google, as the majority of my sites got hit and hit hard!

I said to him that I had approx 20 sites, with about half in one particular niche, I had used the same backlinking method on all sites but some had been hit hard by the latest update and I couldn't make any sense of it, trying to backward engineer the new algo was causing me real problems, this is when he told me a bit of golden information, but wanted to run it past you folks to see if its right, or if he has also been led up the garden path!

He said that he has an inner circle of friends that included a contact who didn't exactly work for google, but was some kind of freelancer, or contractor, who had access to some engineers within the search engine team. He went on to say that the google search algo is evolving from old techniques, and that pushing a new update is not an exact science, its kind of like building an extension of your house without adding anymore foundations, and as such their is no exact formula or at least it is very complex! But what he did tell me is that the new penguin update isn't as smart as most people think, or should I say as clever, it is smart - very smart. What I was told is that the new algo first uses the old methods to find your links, then it looks at the links and see if any come from forums, article sites, web2.0 sites etc. If any of your backlinks come from cancelled accounts, i.e have 404 pages it tells google that you have been banned, or your article has been banned from these sites for illegal reasons like scamming.

We continued this conversation and I started to think about it - the sites that got hit hardest for me were the sites that I had done a lot of work on (backlinking) and thus would have more 404 sites that use to backlink to my sites, and thus made sense.

The penguin update therefore is an additional crawl of your backlinks to find the percentage of 404 that use to link to your site - if the percentage is greater than x, then you get penalized.

I then went on to mention about the theory that many people believe that the google analytics account has an impact on your sites, i.e. google has further information on bounce rates etc. He said that he had heard of this but was not convinced, and said that he wouldn't worry too much about this.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on this.