We all know Google is a honcho and on the second thought, SEO comes out to be yet another key component in online businesses. Just when everyone started assuming SEO is dead, let us confirm, it’s right here to stay. Perhaps many of us misunderstand its potential in web businesses. Great SEO is not at all about tricking search engines, spamming links, or ruining web designs, SEO essentially, just for an introduction is largely about enhancing the prospects of a website to sustain top rankings consistently, reap in revenues and sales for the company and make visitors flock more. It is also most importantly the process of getting traffic the organic way, and accruing natural listings on search engines.

However there have been times when the very affectionate SEO has faced threats from Google updates. Threats of being rooted out and dead in no time. And now that it has been around for so long, seems nothing could overpower the importance of SEO, and it is here to stay. Over the years, from time to time, Google’s updates have wreaked tremors of havoc in the realm of SEO community.

Let’s see when SEO felt insecure and experienced ripples of apocalypses:

• First panic incident was back in 2003 when Florida update was introduced. There were some areas in SEO practices that were critically injured like repetitive inbound anchor text with mere diversity, dense repetition of keyword phrases in title and on pages, lack of related vocabulary in a page copy, words in a phrase exhibiting near proximity.
• Jagger update in 2005 was yet another horrifying year for SEO. Affected areas include reciprocal and irrelevant backlinks, backlinks from sites hosted on the same IP, abuse of keywords in same anchor texts, duplicate, rare and archaic contents, and over optimization like too much of HTML mark up.
• Vince Update that was launched in 2009 and favoured big brands caused an upheaval among site owners engaged with core competencies like health insurances and air line tickets.
• Panda Update is yet another threat that left SEO hopeless to survive. Some of the majorly affected areas were non original contents, increasing number of duplicate content, abundant ads, over optimized contents, low user engagement, low CTR in Google search results.
• Penguin update that launched in the year 2012, April, affected low variety of link anchors, backlinks from websites of same type, backlinks from irrelevant websites, any link manipulating schemes, keywords stuffing.

Over these years there has been a pattern that Google has followed to stay strict with SEO practices. The giant search engine has always been concerned with quality standards and never meant to prove fatal for SEO as such. Updates haven’t been as grave as we thought they could be, however it is also important to structure SEO practices the fair way possible. Instead of shifting blames from one update to another, it is advised to integrate Google rules and algorithms to websites for better results and effective sustenance on top slots.