Scott Wingo Business: SEO before Penguin: The Glory Days

Not that long ago, it wasn’t all that difficult to optimize a website for a search engine. Before there was Penguin or Panda, there was color. Or rather, there were shades of gray – areas that weren’t quite white-hat but weren’t black-hat enough for Google to penalize you for using them.

SEO wasn’t easy, per se, but it was easier.

The rules were more simple:

Post decent content.
Optimize your content for high-traffic, low-competition keywords with selling connotations.
Don’t use obvious black-hat techniques like link-bombing.
Build backlinks to your website. The more the better.
Pack your keywords as dense as Google will let you (about 2% for most niches).

There were obviously details for each of these rules, but by and large, you could become an ‘SEO expert’ in a matter of weeks if you dedicated yourself to learning them. It might take a while to actually optimize a website, but it could actually be done by a single person working just a little overtime full time for a few weeks.

The most difficult parts of ‘old style’ SEO were producing content, some folks even outsourcing to writers off shore, like in India and the Philippines that spoke (or rather wrote) English just well enough to get Google to understand what they intended their topic to be. You could outsource an article overseas, and while with most of this content any English-speaking human that read it would laugh and click away, the search engine spiders didn’t mind the off syntax, so it worked.

Link-building was largely a matter of using automated systems that could mass-produce backlinks for you and hiring more outsourced link-builders to create those links that couldn’t be automated. SEO companies in the US often did the ‘hard’ work of producing quality content – the pieces that you expected people to read and that you put your company logo on – while they outsourced other content.

Then along came Penguin and before that its older brother Panda, and everything changed. Since we’re going to focus specifically on the Penguin update next week, let’s do a little bit of ‘in-between’; the time after the mammal but before the bird.