Google Authorship Algorithm

Brian posted about Google+ a tip that the All of us Patent Office has released a newer form of the Google patent on Google Authorship. This is referred to as Authentication of a Factor of Online Written content # 20120265755.
Now, Costs Slawski summarized the first one last April, he referred to as Google's Comment Patents and exactly how Pages' Web Rankings Could be Influenced by Commentors' Reputations.
What are the differences in between this new updated one and the original one? Brian clarifies:
Reputation score relies at least in part on reviews of the online content item that were provided by one or more experts

Ranking for the creator based at least simply on the reputation report for the author as well as reputation scores of one or more authors who supplied the reviews
Position is weighted according to a status level of the one or more authors who provided the evaluations.
This is really some saturday and sunday reading. So when you've got a chance, print out Authentication of a Contributor involving Online Content Number 20120265755 and read it over the weekend.

The Impending Updates to Penguin and What They Mean for Black Hat SEO

Google has always been focused primarily on creating the best possible search experience for its viewers. This has meant aiming for maximal relevancy to their queries and maximal content quality in the results that do appear. Because of these two mutual aims, the search giant has always aimed its efforts at steadily eliminating low grade or deceptive search results. Naturally, this means eliminating websites that used black hat SEO tactics and search algorithm manipulation to elevate their search rankings.

Recently however, Google released two major algorithm changes, respectively named Panda and Penguin, as part of an even more vigorous than normal effort to purge the search listings of spammed rankings and web pages that weren't valuable to the search engine's users.
Penguin in particular has had a major impact on the web and black hatters in particular; let's go over what it did and cover what further impending rumors would mean.

Penguin up to Now

Since its first release in April of 2012, Penguin has gone through one major follow-up update and dozens of smaller micro changes in the months that followed. The first release of Penguin was quite impactful and affected an estimated 3% of the websites on the web as a whole. This is an enormous number when you consider the size of the indexed web, and its impact becomes even heavier if the percentages amongst certain website types are take into consideration. Online sales and marketing sites that had heavily promoted their SEO rankings through tricky and manipulative tactics suffered in droves, quite possibly as much as 30% to 75% of this entire online segment was negatively affected.

What Penguin targeted was two broad areas of rank manipulation through SEO spam:

The first kind of affected sites were those that stuffed their otherwise low quality content with overused keywords and phrases in an effort to get the attention of the search spiders that Google uses to index all the pages of the web and rank them accordingly.

The second kind of sites that were massively affected by Penguin were those that had used link farms, link spam and link purchasing at low quality, low relevance sites to boost their backlink profiles and look more popular on the web than they really were or deserved to be.

What Penguin aimed to create more of was search results that led to websites whose content was genuinely engaging, valuable, relevant and informative to its readers. It also aimed to rank more highly websites that had backlinks leading to their pages not through manipulation vie link spam but because they had earned the links by being trusted and popular enough amongst other websites for their content to be linked to through pages that related to it meaningfully.

What Rumored and Future Penguin Updates will Continue to Mean for Black Hat

More of the exact same thing!

First of all, there is no absolute certainty as to whether any major changes on the algorithm are coming soon; Google has been famously mute about the possibility and the rumor has been floating since July, with people even back then saying that the changes were "imminent". It has now been nearly 4 months and nothing notable has arrived.

However, regardless of what Penguin algorithm changes do emerge in the days to come or whatever completely new algorithms get unleashed on the search index, the one thing we can all be sure of is that they will have the same essential aim of eliminating dishonestly ranked content and rewarding quality content that was organically optimized and had its popularity raised.

The essential trend that future algorithm changes to Penguin will create is one of decreasing returns on investment in black hat SEO, the intent of this will be to force more and more of those that follow such practices to simply stick with honest tactics that require genuinely high quality content and websites in general.

About the author: Dirk Reagle’s storied career has been filled with accolades and awards. When he’s not writing top-notch articles about the tech industry, you can find him covering design companies such as Orbit Media in Chicago.