"Forget Google Search traffic" - do you agree ?

http://phpvalley.com/blog/forget-google-search-traffic/

The article basically says Google had changed its algorithms irrationally before and in future may do so again. Therefore it can make or break your business/website, even if you followed their guidelines to the letter. So, it is totally suicidal in the long run to build a business relying on google search traffic.

Case in point, those who went bankrupt after panda/penguin. How they went against their own advice they have been giving in their webmaster blogs etc. And how google 'redefined' article directories etc as 'bad' things.

The logic is that something which is rational for Google, is not necessarily rational for world wide web, and the webmaster community. Just like how Facebook killed social share virality by their EdgeRank algorithm to push people to pay for reach, Google could also want to push us to pay them advertising money for search reach. It is so on Facebook that you have to pay money to make sure your honeymoon status update reaches your distant cousin. Page or Individual, reach is 2%, and if there is 'high virality', it reaches up to 10%. Totally pathetic.

By the way, this article is by me, and on one of my own sites. I checked the rules, and apparently its not against the rules to share your own articles if they are relevant and not spammy, so i posted. If it is against, i will remove it if someone tells me.

 

I've been saying for some time now that I think we should worry about our visitors/readers/customers more and Google less. I've given up trying like crazy to please them. They aren't the only game in town, just the biggest. But they only have as much power over our businesses as we give them.

I think being subservient to the Google gods is a mistake and takes the focus off building relationships with those who help us survive online.

Just my two cents.

 

Thats how i think.

But moreover, i also always thought seo'ing for google was VERY inefficient - you either achieved getting on the first page of results for a targeted term, or you achieved nothing. that was how it was always. actually, first page is not enough either - have to be in the upper half of first page. actually i rarely remember clicking any result down under the first half, despite im using google extensively for a lot of intricate searches in my work, which bring up very few relevant results.

I have bought numerous sites which were being sold at digitalpoint after panda/penguin disasters - sites which had their traffic screwed to bits, despite being totally legitimate sites. Their owners sold it because they didnt have the time or funds to deal with 'fixing' the sites for seo.

What i saw from those sites after i took them over is that, despite google's incoming search traffic was screwed royally for these sites, traffic from community forums, websites, ages-old website reviews, links here there were STILL sending traffic steadily.

Which made me think - if these people spent effort for promoting their sites this way, instead of relying on google, the sites would not get screwed by google overnight.

 

I agree with everything you said, @unity100, even the part about not getting relevant search results, which I find very frustrating. I thought the whole point of the algo changes was to improve searches.

Google has a right to run their business any way they choose of course but we have a right to make other choices. I have this dream that we do a mass exodus to other SEs, to see how it would change things - both the quality of the others (due to massive increase of use) and whether or not it would humble Google enough to make them a little easier to work with. Likely would never happen in the near future but it would make for a great experiment.

 

I don't think that Google is telling that article directories are spam. They told about the link building strategies by the webmasters which looks like spammy if you do it rapidly or artificially. Google Now supports natural backlinks.

 

The problem is iweb, the concepts 'spammy', 'artificially', 'natural' are all defined by a bunch of engineers and execs at google. The definition not only can change with people in the team changing, but also over time. And it did too.

Not to mention no one can exactly empirically explain what these terms are. some vague explanations are given by google, and then entire search engine optimization industry is left to do guesswork. i read a zillion articles after panda/penguin from many prominent sites and seo blogs trying to find some sense in the new search results.

by the way search quality got screwed too. back then i could do a search and find an exact result by someone working in some random datacenter who had to use a very particular sql query in a very particular situation years ago, solving my problem in an example case. but now apparently their 2-3 page blog is not 'authority' enough now, so i cant get such results anymore. instead i get stackoverflow results, most half-relevant to whatever i am searching.

other results are not too different. im always coming up with results from various - apparently 'authority' - domains in every other search type i regularly do. gone the old search variety from many different sites.

see. how things can change.

this new 'authority site' concept is not only a screw-up of search results, but it is something that also concentrates search engine traffic to a handful of already big sites, and some lucky small sites which made it into the list somehow.

3 months later this can change totally. because it totally depends on some people working at google.

 

i totally agree. Almost every search sees to bring up a crappy stackoverflow answer. I try to use social traffic more than organic search. The results ae faster and i get the visitors are more engaged from the off.

Relying on Google is just too risky, but free organic search traffic isn't a bad thing to have. My advice would be to do on page SEO and build a good social profile, but don't waste your time with link building. Eventually natural links will come if your site is good enough.

 

yeah thats what i wrote in the article. basic seo. like, proper title, keyword, desc metas, not too many outbound links, clean site code etc. on-site stuff. If these are done, and the person is promoting his site in communities, blogs, forums and whatnot, the other part of seo just comes in anyway.

the problem with social traffic is it comes and goes very fast. i wrote some of my experiences with different networks in a 2nd article i split off from the seo article. http://phpvalley.com/blog/alternative-traffic-sources-to-google-search/

Basically the problem is, its difficult to keep social traffic on the site and have them engaged. people are too used to clicking, reading/seeing something for a few seconds, and then going away. worst is stumbleupon traffic. it comes and goes in seconds due to the stumble button's magic.

so much that it seems people are using social networks as the 'discovery engine'. Ie 'if something is important or worth seeing, it will come to my feed anyway'. thats rather bad.

what im thinking is, to make use of social traffic, what you show to the person coming from social media need to be EXTREMELY simple, easy to understand, eye catching. which needs to sit in a VERY simple, uncluttered page. So that it will be impossible to mistake anything.

 

There is life after Google. I'm getting about 30K unique visitors a month. Only 17% of those are Google organic traffic.

 

Did you use social media ? Or community/forum advertising ? or adwords etc ?

 

Among other things, I post each new page to Facebook and Google+ and a very small handful of other highly-rated social sites such as reddit. And over the years I've sent a ton of direct mail to highly-focused, targeted traffic in my website's niche. That has produced a lot of faithful repeat visitors. No adwords, no community/forum advertising (other than my signature link here at Digital Point).

 

Yeah sending direct mails was vouched for by someone else too, in another article i read. i dont remember where.

however, how do you go around the problem of being taken as spam ? even if the users dont, their email providers may just spamlist you. ending up getting into spamcop etc.

 

I agree with you here. The way I see it is that Google is trying to promote legit sites that answer it's customers questions. The difference between:
1) SEO site that is spammy
2) SEO site that actually could solve google's customers problem

isn't that dramatic. I still think you can rank within 24/48 hours for some keywords with the right backlinking and minimal onpage optimization. You just have to do it right. Type out a 500 word article on the topic, use your iphone/droid to take a new pic, and maybe post a youtube video review on the site.

You just went from being a spammy site who's sole purpose was to get you to click the link. To a decent website in Google's eyes.

In other words, I agree with the article. But disagree with the idea that you have to ignore google completely. Just look at google as the measuring scale to how well you're serving your customers.

 

Is google a rational measure for determining that. i dont think so.

 

I disagree. Google has eliminate most ways of getting customers via spam. They rank websites that basically mimic organically built websites. They rank websites that mimic authority sites. Google's whole job is to give their customers the best content. Otherwise, they'll lose them. Build a site that serves good content and solves the persons issue.

 

"....They rank websites that mimic authority sites......."

Since everyone will be doing it, won't that also be a means of spam in just a year from now.

 

Well... Google is still the GIANT of SE's. We should play by FOLLOWING it's rules. No matter if we like it or not, for me it's still the best way to get some QUALITY and TARGETTED traffic especially if the right keywords were chosen!

 

I agree with you! We all seems to be dependent of Google which is not good at all. I think people should switch towards Yahoo and make it a successful search engine.