It began to happen on September 2005, the dreaded and famous Google Jagger update that would forever change the rules of the game. It shook the seo world and turned it upside, then right side up, and upside down all over again!

Since then it has been a steady up hill battle for even established spammers and BH's alike! Before the Jagger update, manipulating Google was considered easy. After the Jagger update things slowly got harder and harder!

Stripped from spammers was the ability to count on link farms and various link shemes that made topping the serps easy. Also it was the beginning of the end for the infamous blog & ping technique! Also effected where those good ol boys WH's who relied on purchased text links! Suddenly it became very difficult to game Google. Not impossible mind you, just very difficult!

You can be sure that Jagger hurt a lot of webmasters. In fact even now, 2 years later, many webmasters still have not fully recovered their losses. It wasn't the end of the world, but it certainly was a major wake up call for many webmasters. So where are we now? Two years and several updates later we still see spam is a problem. It's certainly not as present on top serps as it use to be, but we are still seeing it at full force only this time targeting lesser competitive search terms. If it's so much harder to spam search engines, why do we still see so much of it?  The anwser is because even though Google was successful in taking away a great portion of it by devaluing all the bogus link shemes, it has not been able to do very much to stop the splogs from targeting lesser competitive key words and terms. It has reduced their value for sure, but all that means is spammers must now work twice as hard! And that is why we still see so much spam.

Spammers have also been hurt on another popular front, their own turf too, on blogs! It's no longer as easy to spam blogs. With programs like Akismet, and Hashcash,  it's almost impossible to get comment and trackback spam through! I use them both together! Spam is a non issue for me on my blogs.

What's left? Other then targeting lesser competitive search terms, the only other efective avenue left for spammers are the social bookmark sites! This process is also known as tag and ping and for a couple of months was just as effective as the old blog and bing. But now even gaming socials is getting harder too!

Unless some new spam technique emerges soon, or Google blunders big time, we will see spam take a even bigger hit! With social bookmark sites finding ways to combat spam, and more improvements across all search engines, these days it seems to be faster and more effective to use whitehat techniques! Even such prominent BH and spam consulting resource pages like Army Of Blogs is reporting the same news and recommending falling back on more solid WH techniques for the sheer reason at this time any way, it works better and faster then most BH techniques!

Jagger flattened the playing field for webmasters. Once again or may be even for the first time, it seems we are all on equal ground. All that is really needed to gain rank are honest links from a few good sites, and decent content! Oh sure you will still see your share of splogs, but rest assured they are no where near as effective as they were even last year! But before you get too excited, you must realize that there are always going to be new techniques introduced, most fail or have minimum effect, but once in a while a truly effective technique is discovered and milked until it no longer works. It seems spammers are in the midst of a severe dry spell right now, and if some thing new doesn't come around soon, we may see more BH's switching to WH's simply because it's easier!