Did Google just give away how Penguin works?
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At SMX during the You&A with Matt Cutts, Danny asked why the algo update was called Penguin. Matt said:
"We thought the codename actually might give too much info about how it works so the lead engineer got to choose."
Last night Google released their 39 updates for the month of May. Among them was this:
"Improvements to Penguin. [launch codename "twref2", project codename "Page Quality"] This month we rolled out a couple minor tweaks to improve signals and refresh the data used by the penguin algorithm."
Whoa, codename twref2 for Penguin improvement? Is this giving us an insight about how it works? I would guess the ref2 means second refresh perhaps. But tw I am not sure about.
What do you think? Is there a hidden insight here?
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Matt's statement also implies the changed the codename and/or didn't release the internal codename, so it's really tough to say. Even publicly, they called it the "Webspam update" prior to "Penguin".
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I suspect that's just Penguin 1.1 - you could look to the previous month's highlights for Penguin 1.0 - two stand out, IMO:
Keyword stuffing classifier improvement. [project codename "Spam"] We have classifiers designed to detect when a website is keyword stuffing. This change made the keyword stuffing classifier better.
Improvements to how search terms are scored in ranking. [launch codename "Bi02sw41"] One of the most fundamental signals used in search is whether and how your search terms appear on the pages you’re searching. This change improves the way those terms are scored.
The first one is obviously related to Penguin, hard to say on the second. Codename "Spam" isn't exactly telling us much we don't already know
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Using my Matt Cutts decoder ring (mailed in 20 box tops off Google O's cereal to get it) it says the codename stands for "Test Webmasters: Resistance Engagement Fun".
This is version 2.0.
See? We've just solved Penguin!
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I'm guessing the T in tw could be term, text, title, time or trust. Those are common t words in SEO.
The W could be whois, whitehat, wordpress, wall, web, widget.
Just trying to get some ideas out there.
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