Anecdotal note on SEO. I used to be really big into SEO. I used to do things all the time by the book. I worked to get really good inbound links, worked to fin

Anecdotal note on SEO. I used to be really big into SEO. I used to do things all the time by the book. I worked to get really good inbound links, worked to find great directories to link from, and was really into "white hat" SEO. Fast forward a few years into the late aughts. Had a client who needed a site in less than two months. Some 15 pages of content, design, CMS and a new logo to boot. Was going to pay me a lot if I could do it. I got it done and was sweating bullets because I had essentially copied all the content on his site from other sites in the same industry. I essentially aggregated all of the big players content into his site. I was petrified the site would get ranked and yanked and I'd spend months trying to get the site back into the SERPS. Guess what happened? Within a month, the site was outranking all the bigger companies in his industry. The site was one page 1 of Google in less than 60 days. All the companies he was competing with were at the bottom of page 1 or pushed to page 2. It never dropped lower than #3 on the first page in Google. The site broke nearly every cardinal rule of SEO - duplicate content, keyword stuffing, fake inbound links, etc. and still managed to be on the front page of Google for a host of long tail search terms and has continued to stay on the front page. It just confirmed Google doesn't care about enforcing any of its rules any more. If I did what I did, I can only imagine what other people are doing to push their site into the top of the rankings.