The exact formula used for the penalty checker tool is proprietary. Fruition utilize their math Ph.D’s and their servers running a statistical analysis program to quickly isolate which updates have the most statistically significant impact on your website.

They also utilize third party information (but not data) from reputable sources such as SearchEngineLand.com and Barry Schwatz’s excellent blog posts on Google updates. When naming an update they  try to follow naming conventions from Google or Search Engine Land to avoid confusion. You will see that they often name updates in-between larger updates such as Panda 20.1 or Penguin 1.5 to make up for updates that have not been reported elsewhere.

In addition, they do not ignore chatter on Twitter and certain private SEO message boards to help improve their forecasting. They also do not use Google search rankings because Google’s terms of service disallow that. We do need a website’s Google Analytics data to improve the model.

Requirements:

• Businesses with >5,000 search visits per month.
• At least 6 months of Google Analytics data. Omniture supported for enterprise level clients only
• Two free minutes of your time (usually less).