Over the last few decades, marketers all over the world have been trying to discover the magic formula for using the Internet to build their brand and grow their sales. Companies were built, thrived, and sometimes folded, while promising to put brands on the map with search engine optimization (SEO) and link building.

In the meantime, Google and other primary search engines continued to preach relevance while improving the way they evaluated web pages.

Last year, Google introduced some big changes to their process, allowing them to better identify quality sites and reward them with a high ranking in their result pages. They called the update Panda. Since that time, Google continues to improve Panda, making it more and more difficult to get high rankings without quality content. The key word here is “content.” (more…)