When Google did a U-turn a few months back it turned the SEO industry on its head. For years SEO agencies built their business and earned money on building links to their client sites. Where the links came from did not matter. It was a numbers game till Google decided to change course.
Suddenly all those links incoming to the client sites became the reason for poor SEO performance. Google introduced the 'disavow' tool which allowed SEO agents to unlink from certain websites deemed spammers. Its hacking and burning time as years of work is reversed. If the link even remotely appears spammy ? disavow it!
What is funny are the mails that would go something like this, ' Dear Webmaster, my client has a great site in so and so industry. Please provide a link to our site from your esteemed site', has now turned into, 'Dear Webmaster, due to recent google updates we request you to please remove the link from your spammy site to ours.'
All this would be hilarious if it was not so tragic and affecting so many people's livelihood. The net effect of all this is:
Good sites which have worked hard doing SEO by Google's earlier standard are now stranded.
Years of SEO work is now thrown away.
Deserving sites are now not getting the traffic they deserve.
And after all Google's claims the search results have really not improved. In fact for many keywords, they have worsened.
Google's 'Do no evil' motto is just that, a motto. ? Although Google never supported SEO directly, there was always a symbiotic relationship between it and the SEO community, which it has now thrown to the wolves with reckless abandon, all in the name of improving search results that are not really improving.
Not so cheerfully,
Ron
