Five years ago, the chance of getting hit by a real SEO penalty was incredibly small.
There was a lot of talk and fear about being “banned by Google”, but in the majority of cases this was completely unfounded.
And bear in mind that these were the days of black-hat SEO tactics being a lot more commonly used and accepted, as ultimately it boiled down to “what do we have to lose”.
“What do we have to lose” changed dramatically in February 2011 with Google’s first release of their Panda algorithm update, that hit so called thin content hard. And this approach has continued ever since.
So in the past, many businesses could justify leaving SEO on their to-do list. Probably not the wisest move, but it’s always hard to justify spending resources on opportunity cost, and most websites still get some traffic from Google anyway.
Today it’s a very different situation. With 17 significant updates in 2013, and 13 updates in 2014, the situation looks set to get worse before it gets better.
Why? Because there’s an ongoing cat-and-mouse battle running between Google and dodgy SEOs, and yet we’re all still seeing an awful lot of crappy websites in the search results.
You may be wondering: Why should I even care?
You need to care because this has the potential to hurt you. We’ve seen and worked with a lot of companies who never knowingly did anything wrong, but they’ve been hit by the updates.
We’ve even worked with companies that used techniques that Google accepted or even encouraged in the past, but have since decided that these are frowned upon or even outlawed.
So you may never have done anything wrong. But you could still be penalised, or even just hurt. (Pain is bad by the way).
Google’s Penguin update (originally in 2012) was all about over-optimisation. Some of the websites affected had done nothing more than try to optimise their content for Google. Eugh.
I believe that the Google of today punishes the lawless and rewards the law-abiding.
Even if you’re not hit by an algorithm update, your competition may be rewarded, pushing your site down in the rankings.
In other words you don’t even need to be hit to be knocked down.
So don’t wait for something unpleasant to happen. SEO can no longer remain on your to-do list.
Stay informed, keep up with the latest news and developments, and schedule resources to make sure that you don’t lose your Google traffic altogether.
Speaking from experience, a small investment in prevention can be dramatically more effective than a cure. Stay safe.
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