Here’s a rundown of the latest Matt Cutts video:
1. Penguin 2.0 is coming – Will be a significant change to previous Penguin updates. Someone called out a site recently to Matt Cutts and he said that it would be “hit hard” by the upcoming Penguin update. This led Alex Graves to believe Penguin 2.0 will go after SENuke style links.
2. Advertorials / Native Advertising – Ads should not have links that flow PageRank. Nothing new here. However, Google may start to punish the publisher and/or the advertiser as it sees fit. This strategy by Google seems like it continues to open the door to Negative SEO. Will be interesting to see what sort of effect this has.
3. There will likely be two upcoming changes geared towards tackling “traditionally more spammy” terms like [payday loans] or “pornographic queries.”
4. Minor comment (but potentially impactful) about “going upstream to deny the value to link spammers.” Will this be penalties? Will the link juice stop flowing? Something else? Expect this to roll out in the next few months.
5. Google is working on a more sophisticated link analysis system.
6. A more comprehensive hacked-site detection and communication.
7. Google is working on trying to rank niche authorities more highly.
8. Panda Refinement – They are looking for additional signals to help those that may have been caught in some gray areas. The language here is interesting as it implies they started at either end of the spectrum and are now working their way to the middle. It sounds like this will hopefully be a good thing as the algorithm may have been over-correcting in areas where it shouldn’t.
9. Host Clustering – Mentioned in another recent video, as you drill down through the SERPs, you will be less likely to see numerous results from the same domain. It will still happen, but for the very few that go past the first page of results, hopefully sites like Yelp won’t continue to crowd those results.
10. More information to help webmasters.