Anyone dabbling in SEO can claim that they are an SEO expert. Actually the whole domain of SEO is so vast and so complicated that it is difficult for a novice to unearth the whole concept. Hence you find many website owners that have burnt their hands by wasting money on SEO. It is true that Search Engine Optimization used to be a simple concept but the simplicity got beaten to death thanks to SEO companies manipulating it.

The job of an SEO expert is to use natural means to improve the page rank of a website. This allows a website to get ranked higher in search engine results pages. From experience you will know that users of search engines scarcely go beyond the second or the third page to find or use information. This is true for 99.99% of search engine users. So there is always a mad hustle to get listed on top of search engine results pages. And this is where things get manipulated and misused.

The strategy of Google or any other search engine is simple - if someone uses online search they should get the most relevant sites listed at the top of the SERPs. Thanks to all these manipulations and black hat SEO techniques irrelevant websites started occupying the top spots in SERPs. For example, someone searches for Adidas shoes online and they find and visit a website on page one of Google. However, they then find out that the site they visited has nothing to do with let alone Adidas, but any shoe. Can you imagine how this person would feel? They wouldn't trust Google and the other search engines to show accurate search results. This is what the top search engines didn't want because this was hampering their brand image. Thus these search engines decided to act tough on any SEO expert manipulating the concept of Search Engine Optimization.

As a result Google and the other search engines started changing their search algorithms. No SEO expert was given any information on how the algorithms worked. Whenever there would be a new algorithm people would come to know after it was launched. This way Google started catching websites that manipulated SEO. Google also started coming out with groundbreaking updates in its Webmaster Guidelines. With the Panda update in 2011 Google started punishing sites with poor content and those websites using link farming. Panda impacted 12% searches.

The next big one was the Penguin update that impacted over 3% search results. This updated penalized the spam websites and came down heavily on those websites that used keyword stuffing as one of their SEO strategies. The next update that made a huge impact was Hummingbird. Through this update Google made semantic search and its Knowledge Graph more powerful.

When you deal with an SEO expert ask them about these updates. If, keeping the other factors of top SEO professionals in place, they can tell you and also tell you how they managed to handle these updates you can consider them as your SEO partner.

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