For some  people such as Nick Eubanks it turned out not to be that way and they saw their sited penalised, although he later fixed the source of the problem his rankings never went back to the way they were before the penguin update as he explains in his article “Recovering from an Over Optimization Penalty – A True Story“

The Google Penguin Update was meant to address sites that were over optimized, specially the ones that had a less than clean back link profile, mainly of manipulative links, links from questionable sites, directories or sited that evidently sold links. This time Google ended penalizing the receiving site rather than the link itself.

Every time Google throws an important update at us such as this one there are thousands of ripples in the Social Media channels, and all SEO influencers write countless of blogposts about it, but what does it really mean an up date of an already existing algorithm update like this?

Matt Cuts on Penguin Update 1.1

Let’s start from the official sources, in this case Matt Cutts announced yesterday through his official Twitter account that there was a data refresh to the Penguin Algorithm update that would affect to about <0.1% of English searches:

As always the message is a bit ambiguous and it doesn’t say whether the update is exclusively to English terms or the 0.1% is just an indication of the volume of sites that it might affect.

According to some comments posted in Search Engine Land by some site owners of non-english sites, the rollout has affected international sites as well.

What is this “Data Refresh” Trying to Achieve?

As every update, Google needs several iterations or fine tunings until they can get the results they want, some sites might get affected unfairly along the way and that might be addressed in future releases of the update, as with every update the message that Google sends is that they are trying to improve the search results to deliver better and more authoritative content.

What to do if your site has been affected by Penguin 1.0 or 1.1

First I thin you need to do is check your analytics, whether you use Google Analytics or any other analytics suit such as Omniture, they will be an extremely good source of information, as there you will be able to find the keywords for which you have lost your rankings (probably your main traffic referrers) which might lead you to your “over optimization” wether it’s keyword stuffing in the page (do you really need to repeat the word cheap so many times?) or anchor text stuffing in your internal or external linking.

Then use Webmaster Tools to check your site’s inbound links profile, if you find a site that has 100s of links pointing to your site using the same anchor text (again cheap?) then it’s time to request the removal of that site-wide link and perhaps replace it for one that it’s embedded in some useful and authoritative content within the site rather than a spammy area. Although you might want to re-evaluate the site and reconsider having a link from it pointing to your site.

Start working on a proper link building campaign, engage bloggers, people in your community, forums and media that might be interested in your niche, though some  branded links in there every once in a while, make your link profile look as natural as possible and you might want to get back into business in Penguin Update 1.2.