







SEO is good for your site.

The catch is, not all SEO is equally good.

Certain optimization methods take time to produce results, but prove effective in the long run. Others work much faster but may end up leaving your site in a worse situation than when you started.

Less knowledgeable webmasters may use this as an argument that SEO is ineffective, but it actually proves the opposite: search engines can tell the good sites from the bad. Google, in particular, is an expert – nay, the expert in measuring their worth.

Google’s search ranking algorithm has undergone countless changes since its debut. In the past, nobody could predict all the possible methods to push low-quality sites to the top of search results, but Google dealt with them as they came – with the help of algorithm updates.

Now there are much fewer ways around Google’s principle “quality first” than in the past. No doubt you’ve heard about the silent judges who made it possible: Panda, Penguin and Pigeon, to name but a few.

If you notice a sudden drop in traffic and rankings while looking at your site statistics, you might’ve been bitten (or clawed) by one of those beasts.

Which one? That depends on what you’ve been doing with your site.

Too much of something or not enough of something different – Google algorithm updates cover a lot of ground.

Let’s look at seven of the biggest Google algorithm updates of all time.