#3 Florida Update: November, 2003
Florida was the first of the really big, named Google updates. Back then, SEO was still in its wild, wild West mode and black hat SEO ran rampant. When Florida was implemented, those black hats flipped their lids and blamed Google for all of their woes.
In a sort of Rosetta Stone of Google update aftermath articles titled, What Happened to My Site on Google dated December 6, 2003, SEO guru Danny Sullivan had this to say:
There’s no end of people complaining how they’re losing business because Google is no longer sending them traffic for free. The painful lesson to be learned is that it’s foolish to assume that any search engine will deliver traffic for free.
Sound familiar?