#9 The Dark Ages – September: 2002
Hey SEO fanatics, does this forum posting sound familiar?
How on earth can they justify dropping sites that were ranked in the top 10 and are now page 20 and NOTHING at all has changed on the sites from the last month?
That’s what webmasters were saying after Google’s first known major change in 2001. The details of what exactly got changed in this unnamed update were never really clear, but the results were. Forums lit up with some very familiar complaints.
Turns out that a lot of SEO practitioners had turned to trickery and low quality content to increase page rankings. Glad they nipped that in the bud.