Penguin Update, what I've noticed

[PottyScotty]

Hi Guys, I have spent 2 days looking at our site and competitors after the update, 3 things jump out straight away for us.  I am in the travel industry and still on the first page of the major KW's but in the 8 to 10 region, was 2 to 5.

1. The sites that have moved up both have shops selling merchandise which is not the main focus of their site, anyone else spotted sites with a eCommerce section have benefited from latest update?

2. Sites we have links from, although they look like a travel sites, maybe be themed differently by Google.  Anybody know a good tool that will help determine what theme a site is?  Images, design and content don't always seem to be a good indicator, I think back links to the domain has a big effect on the site you get the link from.  Any tool that will help speed up this process would be great.  We need more quality links from travel sites (or at least what google thinks is a travel related site).

3. The competitors who have done well seem to have 45% links to home page, we only had 28% so we are focusing now on links to home page.

We don't really stand out from the top 10 sites in any other way in terms of other indicators like branded keywords vrs money making kw's.

Any thoughts or feedback would be great.

[PaddyDisplays]

I think alot off people are not taking into account about the penguin 2.0 update its site that are backlinking to you might be devalued.

So you look at your own backlink profile and you think its ok, but the backlink profile of the site that backlink to you might have hand there authority reduced (maybe even penalised). And then what about the backlinks to the backlink of the backlinks ( backlInkception)

My under standing is that penguin 2.0 is only about backlink profiles (like 1.0), and everything else is speculation at this stage without a lot of research.

I'm not saying what your have noted is not correct, just that there are far to many variables at this stage to come to any conclusions and some bigger research needs to be done on it.

"so we are focusing now on links to home page"  I think that might be a good idea, more links to the homepage would look more natural IMO