I am going to have to say that SEO is dead, why the end of lat year I had a debt sucking attorney sue me in court. As retaliation, I found every legal case on the web in which he was a defendant (was sued) and every case on the web in which he was legally sanctioned, and every case on the web that he lost, and built links to them optimized to his name and his business name.
I spent three months building links. All to no avail, why each of the cases that I optimized to his name still ranks some in position from 1 to five of the terms they were optimized today. All of the links were built using GSA and used custom link lists built with Scrapebox. Those links started out on pages ten and later when I found them; some did not even appear under a search for his name or business. It was such a terrible waste of time and effort and failed because I placed the links on the first page for each term intended.
Why it was such a failure that the attorney in question sent me a letter requesting my services to bury the links; I threw the letter away.