It wiped out a lot of sites from the organic search results just a couple of days ago.
If you're a freelance writer who mainly crafts web content for a living, here's a heads up for you: You can cut some slack on canned content and exact keyword positioning, and give natural writing a big welcome hug. Hurray!
The Old Way
For quite a while, search engine optimization (SEO) specialists managed to game the system and manipulate search results by:
- using key phrases in the exact same order -- even if they do not make sense
- using formatting techniques (bold, italics, underlines) to emphasize the key words
- positioning the key phrases "strategically" so that they appear in the title, in the body, and in the last paragraph
That was how things used to work.