One of the questions we regularly get is “When is my score bad enough that I should upgrade”. While this is a subjective question to a certain degree, based on your personal aversion to risk and your budget, but I think a little direction would be appropriate here.
Penguin 2.0 was more strict than Penguin 2.1 in terms of the thresholds necessary to trigger a penalty. What we recommend is that if you are 1 standard deviation over the mean score for sites hit by Penguin 2.0, then you should definitely upgrade your report to see what you can do to protect yourself. That score is 138%.
Of course, the new upgraded reports include exportable CSV data of troublesome links, so they are far more actionable than ever before. It seems like our users had a pretty good idea of what to do anyway, considering the average upgraded report right now is on 110%.
This of course does not mean you shouldn’t upgrade if your score is lower than 138%, rather that below that number you should be considering your personal risk aversion and your business’s ability to tolerate a penalty were one to arise.
I hope this helps you make your decision to upgrade easier and happy penguin hunting!
