Google Removed My Biggest Competitor, Those Who Cheat Always Get Caught

I've had a client who works in the construction industry, and for roughly a year now, he's been battling with a competitor who cheated his way to the top of Google. Now, when I say cheated I mean cheated in the most obvious ways possible. Stuff like whitening out words to expand his keyword usage, using fake addresses on his Google Business Profiles, and even just copying content word for word from pages we've created in the past. It's actually impressive how long they've gotten away with some of this stuff, I imagine mainly due to the fact that Google just doesn't care about user experience as much as they say (another rant for another time)

But for a while, they did outrank us and kept us out of that number 1 position, always just one below them. Now, for anyone who does SEO the difference between number 1 and 2 is a pretty good amount of leads/traffic, and because of this, my client was getting pretty angry to the point where he started asking me if maybe we should start doing some of this stuff but I always reassured him that when the time comes we will get the spot and Google will right this wrong. Finally, it happened, with the newest core update focused on quality content, Google penalized its site to the dirt. Traffic deleted, webpages not indexed, and the icing on the cake is not only do we rank number 1 now for a good amount of keywords organically, but not related directly to the update, which was his Google Business Profile getting suspended.

I hate to pray on other people's downfalls because I imagine whoever owns that business is just like all of us, but we all have to play by the rules, and it goes to show cheaters never win in the long run.