According to Benjamin Franklin, the only things that were certain in life were death and taxes. Had the great statesman been alive in this millennium, he would have surely added changes to search-engine algorithms to the list.

A couple of months ago, Google rolled out the latest update to its search algorithm, code named Penguin. There is no definitive reason for the quirky naming convention that Google uses (the previous update was called Panda), but looking at the alternate name for the update – webspam algorithm update – we get a better idea of what is going on.

In a nutshell, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) falls into two camps – White Hat SEO and Black Hat SEO. The former is concerned with quality content, proper site architecture and all-around goodness for the web going public; the latter … not so much. It is more concerned with gaming the system and finding the easy, not-so-honest ways to rank high in search results. Penguin simply makes an attempt to clear out the Black Hat SEO that Google feels is prevalent on the web today.

Changes in the search algorithm always come with a healthy dose of ridicule and Penguin is no exception. A quick web search on “Google