Jesus! I got hit badly by COVID because I have mainly tourism websites. Then we got that Amazon commission cut. And now another wonderful Google update. What a month!
At least I was happpy to see in websmater tools a few days ago one of my 2 main websites receiving very nice natural backlinks from an university and a TV channel.
Well I put back the Champagne in the fridge quickly, it went down with the update. Fucking whitehat BS. No more financial loss because COVID already took everything but the come back I expected will be harder. PBN still work if you don't force on anchors. The pages receving those backlinks stay quite stable. And authority websites can do whatever they want on their page and receive no backlink, they will rank high whatever their content. It is boring ; good editorial content doesn't protect you from a good crash. I see many good blog articles, who don't do much SEO, leaving the first page to be replaced by poorly made authority ecommerce pages.
Since updates after Penguin, I don't really see quality improvements in SERPS, almost the opposite. They introduced those stupid sponsored links because the bot is still unable to recognize paid links, PBNs and other things.
More than ever : diversify, diversify, diversify. And it is good to take various SEO roads on various websites to limit the variance. I will keep pretty clean on some (although I will pay for a few quality links) and go dirtier on others.