Explain how this makes sense to me!

Actually, the latest iteration of Penguin changed that. Supposedly, sites are not getting hammered for bad backlinks anymore. Instead, those bad backlinks are now just being ignored and not passing any link value to the pages. Your job is to sort through those 1,500-2,500 links and figure out which ones are the good ones and get those. It's doubtful that every single one of them are bad links to have.

Also, it's not just about backlinks anymore, although they are still extremely important. Content and user experience seem to play a far bigger role now than they did in the past in the easy era of "get a link, any link, and as many as you can to rank" that summed up 2006-2010.

You almost have to go back to the pre-2,000 way of building a website these days (without the horrible design and all of the keyword stuffing). Create something valuable that real people will want to link to and that real people will want to read. If you can place a link, yourself, on someone else's website, it's almost guaranteed to be worthless these days.

The rest of the SERP competition is worse?

SEO is pretty much the same (text + links) but If your niche is local real estate, that's changed a lot in the last 8 years.

Are you a real estate agent or buying/flipping houses?

You are doomed if you are using here as your source. If you haven't noticed about 90% of the more experienced SEOs are gone - a great deal of them after Penguin started out.

You've gotten good answers in this thread so far. As Dave suggested best to look over those backlinks again. There are probably some good ones and as he stated negative SEO is not as big a deal of recent. You do have to get some decent backlinks and have your on page set in order to rank in any competitive niche.

It doesn't make sense if you buy the line that somehow google has changed.

They never liked what people did to shmooze them.

And when they reiterated something, emphasized this, or clarified that...

You had all the wannabes running around like chickens with their heads cut off.

Nothing much has changed. But people go gaga over shtuff like ssl....

Google rarely makes major changes. And when I say major, I mean just that...major.

People were manipulating nofollow, so they made all links on a page affect PR.

That would have affected me.....zero.

People were manipulating PR, so they made it secret.

That would have affected me....zero.

Google said something about ssl......and people went out and tripped their sites with https.

That affected me....zero.

Google came up with the ethereal disavow.....people went ape.

That affected me....zero.

I can't think of any change google made that affected me.

Why? Google does not run MY business. I own it.
(That and the fact that I never tried any such nonsense that people talked about doing)

I cannot fathom why people think their business success is based on google.

If it is, you have no real business and no business having or starting a business.

Here's a typical google induced wannabe....

=====
Google says don't drive a car from point a to point b.
So they drive a car from point a, then to point c, then to point b.
So google has to reiterate, don't drive to a then c then to b.
===

But people scramble telling everyone that driving to c is bad!

Each update is not much more than a restating a rule to warn people about possible shmoozing.

If you never drove from point a and ended up at point b...LIKE THEY FRIGGIN said in the first place, you would have no worries!

They told people over and over....stop worrying about PR and shmoozing it!

When they made it secret.....wannabes went all over the place telling people that google got rid of PR and it doesn't matter.

Which is one big, fat unicorn.

I don't chase unicorns. Or dragons.

Paul