What's changed in the SEO world in two years?

So, for reasons too complex to go into here, I have been completely out of the SEO/SEM world for two years.

The gist of my question is, what has changed? Where should I go to catch up?

I'm not looking for specifics...that would take waaaaay too long or too many posts, but is there some seminal article that came out recently? Some new website with great new tools? What have the "big picture" changes been?

Or is it business as usual?

Thanks everyone!

 

things on SEO world change often. what worked 2 years ago, lot of them either dont work or not as much effective as it has been before. i do not know of any specific article that would point out the differences of before and after but you can read few popular webmaster forums to get a feeling what people are talking about now

 

Welcome back to the seo industry Ticktockman. These days the search engines are getting smarter and producing more complex algorithms. So it is more important than ever to make your marketing look natural....gradual link building pace, varied link anchor text, links from multiple sources, etc.

One somewhat recent development is the introduction of the nofollow link attribute. Google introduced this to allow website owners to link to sites without passing PR. So you have to be aware of which sites use this nofollow attribute on external links. This tag can also be useful for controlling where internal PR is sent on a site. Many sites add nofollow to links to terms & conditions, privacy policy and other pages that don't need PR.

Social bookmarking is another trend that has taken off in the last little while. It works quite well for buzz worthy sites, but is not very effective for regular websites.

Also in the last 2 years, Google has further built on their dominance of the search industry. So it is even more important to rank well on Google now.

You may also want to look into the canonical link attribute.

There hasn't been many other developments. Just start participating in a few good seo forums/blogs and you should catch up in no time at all. Most of what worked 2 years ago does still work today.

 

Everyone these days is an 'SEO',

-1000 directory submissions for $1.29 = SEO
-5000 spam comments in poor English = SEO
-Cut and pasted or spun article submitted to 300 article sites for $1.49 = SEO
-Your site submitted to 400 top search engines for $.99 = SEO

I could go on and on but it just gets more painful

 

The compitition!

 

I would have thought it would be "The competition"

 

SEO is changed a lot frequently depending on the new trends on the web. You need to keep reading all the famous SEO forums top update your knowledge. We can't just write another SEO book in a single post.

 

people are just spiting every where and expressing themselves as a seo experts.

 

It just makes a good SEO's job much more difficult. Particularly if the client has had a poor experience in the past.

Dan

 

Thanks for the responses everyone! Yeah - it looks like not a whole lot has changed. Spammy SEO is still spammy SEO.

What HAS changed is all my great bookmarks for SEO tools have gone dead. A lot of the great backlink tools and such are behind paywalls now...I guess people realized they could be making money?

It looks like the Overture keyword volume tool is finally dead....what are people using as a substitute? Is the Google Adwords Keyword suggestion the best option available now?

 

Google Insights is pretty cool for keyword ideas.

 

I think one of the main changes is that search engines have got smart and now quality out weighs quantity

 

Great new website with great new tools. SpiderLoop.com has probably changed in the last two years.

 

nothing changed... even spam filters do still exist for people like you...

 

I think you are doing the right thing. A lot may have changed but by looking at forums like these and interacting with other webmasters will let you know what people are pursuing now in the SEO world.

 

Wild guess but I reckon SpiderLoop.com is your own website.

 

I have been a content writer for exactly two years and two months. Two years ago, I used to get orders for 500 word articles with keyword densities of 15% or more. That was pretty much part of clients' SEO strategies. Now real SEO experts know better than to use the same keyword in the same paragraph. Oh, and yeah, I'm getting fewer requests for articles with keywords that just don't make sense to a human being.

 

you missed an important element here. this should be:

1000 manual directory submissions for $1.29 = SEO

for an experienced submitter, it would take good 10 hours to submit to 1000 direectories. so anyone who believes that they would get manual work for the cost of dime an hour is surely living in fool's heaven

 

I was doing a slight bit of exaggerating (but not by much). Here is the post I made a couple of weeks ago on the topic: Directory Submission for Less than $1 an Hour

I talk about the new type of SEO offered on DP....Stupid Egghead Option

 

SEO per se is dead, in the sense of the oldschool SEO firms. These days, too many guys are doing "SEO" for just about anything you can imagine. It's become a cliche of bad marketing and waste of money.

IMO, these days, CONTENT is king - and fresh content is KING x 100