SEO and what Google did to it:

SEO was easy and many were even using inappropriate methods for acquiring the most out of the SEO, i.e. a lot of links to have huge traffic to their sites. Article submission, link building, blogging, content developing and marketing, all were easy then. But when Google realized that there are sources trying to trick it into believing that certain content are good and have them in its topmost search results, while they were plain rubbish.

This annoyed the search engine to a great extent and it decided to teach all a lesson and is continuing to do so till date. It came up with its algorithmic updates, all named after animals of black and white colors like the Panda and Penguin update. And it worked. Within a week of introducing each of these updates, there was a drastic change in the search results of Google. While some of the sites which were struggling to climb up the search result rankings with their good content quality suddenly found themselves among the top results, for the rest it was devastating. The websites went down and down into the search results.

So what now?

It is clear that all the SEO services used earlier are now almost not to be used and forget the black hat SEO tricks if you want to survive with your website. You can no more write anything within 400 words and then link it to your site and get it uploaded somewhere on the web. You need to find the right article directories which are popular and can really help with your business. Research has become important and you get everything with proper research.

With Panda update:

When Google updated us with Panda, most of us didn’t take it seriously in the beginning thinking it to be as timid and soft as the animal is itself (Panda). But the hell broke on them within a few days when they saw their websites to be in the bottom of the search results. And whatever they tried, didn’t work. They realized that something seriously is going wrong and understood the real purpose of these updates. More than 60% of the websites suffered and many are still trying their best to come out of it completely. The update targeted websites with poor or inappropriate quality of content and penalized them. Also the ones who were online to have a lot of links to their sites were attacked by the Panda update. The links which were working fine for the website owners now were causing them trouble.

With the Penguin update adding more woe:

When Penguin came into the field, all of them were aware of its capability. They didn’t want to mess or ignore as they did at the time of the Panda update. Penguin too kept a strict watch over the ones which were having poor quality content and also with too much of links (which is obviously suspicious, isn’t it?). It is wise if you are keeping a balance and are not trying to ‘buy links’ and having keyword stuffed content. As long as you are honest, Google will understand and appreciate it as well.