Dewey rolled out on the last week of March 2008 and continued on until early April. While there wasn’t any consensus on the exact changes that the update entailed, the webmaster community reported a significant shift in the algorithm with a large-scale shuffling of results. Moreover, it’s believed that Google was pushing other products like Books, but there wasn’t evidence to support this speculation.
It’s highly likely that the Dewey update was an effort to improve relevancy in the SERPs. The previous year’s updates, notably Universal Search, marked Google’s expansion. With the integration of news, books, videos, images, and maps in the search results, it’s no wonder that the webmaster community was kept on their toes in the months after the update rolled out.
As opposed to previous algorithm updates that affected several smaller portions of the webmaster community, the Dewey update was described as an “old-style Google shake-up” in one of the forum threads. A lot of blogs that previously placed in the top spots in the SERPs lost their high rankings, and some were delisted. This phenomenon occurred even when the websites didn’t violate any of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.
The SERPs themselves were changed. People reported getting different results on similar keywords, which were believed to vary according to the data center that pulled them up. Additionally, sites in the UK witnessed how websites that bought links took the top spots in the SERPs for their keywords.
Paying for links is still being practiced today. Some websites that have established a massive readership count sometimes charge for guest posting. However, they even exercise full editorial control over the topics that will be published in their blog as well as the number of links that should be included in your content and whether they’re tagged with the dofollow or nofollow attribute.
What you should avoid altogether is using automated link building systems which are intended to game Google’s algorithm by using black hat tactics. It’s a form of spamdexing or spamming the index. The search engine has measures in place that can detect massive amounts of suspicious activity from your site.
Here are the three ways that Google detects paid links:
Instead, these are the white hat methods you should religiously practice: