SEO in 2014 vs now, night and day

I ran my first agency back in 2014. All we did was write 500 word blog posts and blast links from directories. Clients loved it. Rankings jumped in like 2 weeks. Fast forward to now. Same strategy gets you penalized or ignored. Google just got too smart. Content needs to be 2000 words minimum, and links have to come from real sites. Does anyone else miss how simple it used to be?

2 comments

2 Comments

butler.abby4d ago

Call me old fashioned but I actually prefer how SEO is now. It filters out the people who just want to game the system and rewards those who actually put in the work to build something real.

skyler_adams4d ago

Had a buddy who ran a local plumbing service site back in 2014. He paid some dude fifty bucks to write a crappy 500 word article about fixing faucets and bought 100 directory links off Fiverr. Site shot to number one in like ten days. He was making bank. Fast forward to 2017, Google hit him with a manual penalty and his traffic flatlined. He tried the same thing again last year with a new site and ended up with zero indexed pages for six months. Total nightmare.