[ahulak]

As someone who first got into SEO about a year before panda and penguin rolled out.. I have to admit, SEO has changed ALOT and Jill hits the nail on the head. Easy keyword related SEO tactics no longer work, Hummingbird has made sure of it..

It makes perfect sense if you break it down over the years...

1) Spammers found out they could manipulate rankings with the meta keywords tag.. shortly after, google started to ignore these keyword tags..

2) Spammers found out they could manipulate ranking with the meta description.. shortly after, google stopped using this description to rank sites..

3) Spammers realized they could build artificial link profiles, so google had to get smarter and started incorporated social metrics and became smarter about how they attributed value to links..

4) etc etc etc

It goes on and one, but basically, the only way google will ever be able to defeat spammers is to create an algorithm that is so smart it actually understands not only what the user wants, but also all of the content in its index.. it has to go much deeper than a simple keyword match - it has to parse out the intent of the searcher as well as the meaning of its content.

[esw]

For what it's worth, Google claims that they never used the keywords tag as a ranking factor.

[mhoad]

In fact for what it's worth neither was the meta description tag and the comment about social signals is misleading at best.