You can feel like a dog chasing its own tail trying to figure out how Google works. There are thousands of bloggers and journalists spreading tons of information that just isn't true. If you've followed all the SEO advice written in blogs, you're unlikely to get top listings in Google, and you risk hurting your site's performance and making it difficult to rank in the first place. Let me tell you a secret about bloggers... Articles about the latest SEO updates, techniques or tips are often written by interns, assistants or even ghostwriters. Your job is to write articles.

The majority of blog posts about SEO are rarely written by experts or professionals who are responsible for increasing website traffic and getting top rankings in Search engines on a daily basis. Can you learn from someone who can't do it themselves? You can not. Because of this, you need to be wary of the advice spread in blog posts. Do not get me wrong. I love bloggers. There are bloggers out there practicing and blogging about SEO and doing it well. But it is becoming increasingly difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff. No fear. This chapter will dispel common misconceptions about SEO, show you how to avoid ending up in Google's bad books, and show you how to keep up to date with how Google ranks websites. But to understand how Google works today, we must first understand some of Google's history.

In the early days of Google - over 15 years ago - Google launched a smarter search engine and a better experience for navigating the World Wide Web.

Google delivered on that promise by delivering relevant search engine results.

Internet users found they could just type what they were looking for into Google - and BINGO - users found what they were looking for in the top results instead of having to dig through hundreds of pages. Google's user base grew rapidly.

It didn't take long for savvy and entrepreneurial webmasters to discover sneaky little hacks to rank high on Google.

Webmasters discovered that by stuffing lots of keywords into the page, they could rank their site high for almost any word or phrase. It quickly turned into a competition to see who could put the most keywords on the page. The page with the most repeated keywords won and quickly rose to the top of search results.

Of course, more and more spammers realized this, and Google's promise as the "most relevant search engine" was called into question. Webmasters and spammers got more sophisticated and found tricky ways to repeat hundreds of keywords on the page and hide them completely from people's eyes.

Suddenly, the unsuspecting internet user searching for "florida vacation" suddenly found himself on a website about Viagra Viagra Viagra!

How could Google maintain its status as the most relevant search engine if people keep spamming the results with tons of spam sites and burying the relevant results at the bottom?

Enter the first Google update. Google released a major update, codenamed Florida, in November 2003 that effectively stops spammers. This update leveled the playing field by making keyword stuffing completely useless and restoring the balance of power.

And so began the long history of Google updates, making it harder for spammers to trick the system and making ranking in Google a bit more complicated for everyone.

Fast forward 15 years and ranking in Google has become extremely competitive and significantly more complex.

Put simply, everyone wants to be on Google. Google struggles to keep its search engine relevant and must constantly evolve to keep providing users with relevant results.

This was not without its challenges. Just like keyword stuffing, webmasters eventually found a clue to another way to play the system by pointing most of the anchor text to the page.

In case you are unfamiliar with this term, anchor text is the text contained in external links that point to a page.

This created another vulnerability that was exploited by spammers. In many cases, well-meaning marketers and business owners used this tactic to achieve high rankings in search results.

There was also a new Google update in 2012, this time called Penguin.

Google's Penguin update penalized sites with a suspicious number of links with the same anchor text pointing to a page by removing sites from search results entirely. Many businesses that depended on search engine traffic lost all their sales literally overnight simply because Google believed that websites with hundreds of links that contained only one sentence would not naturally acquire those links. Google believed this was a solid indicator that the site owner could play the system.

If you find these changes alarming, don't. How to revert to these changes or avoid being penalized by new updates is covered in later chapters. In the brief history of Google's major updates, we can uncover two important lessons to achieve top rankings on Google.