Yesterday (May 22nd 2013) Google released the 2nd generation of Google Penguin updates. 2.3% of the English US results were effected by this updated which is intended to fight spam and black hat SEO techniques.

Many webmasters took a hit and plunged into the deeper pages of the SERPS and now need to quickly figure out a way to recover from this update and climb back to their old positions.

So Google Penguin 2.0 is here, now what?

Google Penguin 2.0 is aimed to fight bad linking, keyword stuffing and various other techniques that are meant to fool Google into thinking their website is more relevant and should as a result rank higher.

The effect of Google Penguin 2.0 is divided into 2:

1. Websites that disappeared from the SERPS (Search Engine Ranking Pages) - disappearing is either not finding the website in the top 100 search results or finding it very close to the 100th result.

2. Websites that got downgraded to the 2nd or 3rd page of the results.

If you are from the 1st group of websites, then you should reconsider your entire way of operation with regards to SEO, this means changing your linking strategy, making changes to your website to make it more user relevant and less search engine relevant, transforming from an info website or ads oriented website into an authority website in your niche and even more.

If you are from the 2nd group of websites, first of all don't panic. You are still doing the right thing, it's not that you got penalized, it's that other websites are more relevant than yours or doing exactly what you are doing just better.

Your next step is to conduct a little research about what your competitors are doing better than you and once done analyzing the results, simply implement them on your website.

The bottom line is that this Penguin update was not meant to harm webmasters it was simply meant to improve the quality and relevancy of search results, if your webmaster is the most relevant to the keywords you target, and you didn't engage in bad SEO tactics then you should be on the safe side, but if you are looking for the easy and quick way to rank high without actually caring about the value of your website to the visitors, then this update is dedicated to you.

Since the update was just recently rolled out we are bound to see some follow up updates in the next few weeks that will correct some mistakes that were made during this update so we are bound to see some ranking change in the upcoming weeks, but the most important statement were already made - Google Penguin is here and now!