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?

3 comments

3 Comments

butler.abby4mo 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.

kais674mo ago

Oh man, yes, thank you! I had a client back in like 2013, a little bakery shop. I wrote them a 400 word article on gluten-free muffins, threw some links from a PBN I bought off some forum, and they were page one for "best cupcakes near me" in under two weeks. Felt like a magician. Then around 2016 I did the exact same setup for a friend's handyman business and Google just sat on it for months before a penalty hit. The whole site got deindexed, poof gone. Took me forever to clean it up and get them back to just ranking for their own business name. I definitely miss when I could just crank that stuff out in an hour and call it a day. It was too good while it lasted I guess.

skyler_adams4mo 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.