Recently, upon looking at all of my sites, I realized that most of them have decreased in PR, as well as traffic. I've been working as a freelancer, so I haven't paid much attention to it. However, upon looking at my sites, I came to the realization that Google, Yahoo, and MSN are nothing more than online traffic monopolies. I see people here at DP crying all the time because their Adsense account got banned, or because their earnings with Yahoo Ads sucked. I feel that the main problem is that people are relying too much on the search engines. Ironically, most of the people here call themselves "self employed." In reality, if you're dependent on one search engine to send you traffic, you are not truly "self employed" you're just an unofficial employee of Google, Yahoo, or MSN. I'm interested in traffic building techniques that don't involve the SEs. And as for page rank, I could care less. Has anyone else thought about this?
SE's are a big factor though in today's internet world. People use the engines to find what they want with just a click of a button. A lot of people who search want there answer right then and there. Thus top rankings bring you the most traffic and higher success rate. Without those rankings then yes you will have to find other means to advertise your website. Thing is most people either do not want to invest the time into doing the work or they simply just do not know what to do with SEM for there website. Yes there are other means of advertising on the internet, wheather its buying banner space on high traffic sites, selling an ebook online that promotes your business or service, popular blog or forum to drive traffic or even email marketing are all other means of advertising online. Yes people cry about there adsense or yahoo earnings because in most cases those are the people that see the shoemoney check or other adsense monthly earnings and want the same thing just without doing half of the work involved. Other's try and dabble in black hat seo and get in over there heads. Until something else comes along I think SE traffic is going to be among the top for quite sometime.
People without succes cry Thanks to programes like Adsese some great sites finance and even profit And it contribuits to the development of the internet
Just what I was thinking. The whole internet is interdependent, especially when it comes to the major search engines - they own a big portion of the internet.
Certainly it is true that Google Adsense acts as a broker for selling advertising. It would be better to sell ads directly to customers, but it takes much longer to develop individual customer relationships. Adsense is great in that way -- they offer a real service to those of us who have more computer skills than marketing skills. I would love to see an advertising market develop here on digitalpoint.com or similar where content providers could market directly to advertisers, and advertisers have an easy way to find their target markets.
Webmasters who provide quality content on their sites don't rely entirely on search engines. For some spammy auto blog Google is your only chance you get some traffic.
Yeah, it amazes me how so many people here at DP brag about making $100 per day in Adsense. They are too blind to see that no matter how much they make in Adsense, they are at the bottom of the pyramid, and this includes even shoemoney. Why? Because Google holds the keys to all the gates. If they decide to ban your account suddenly, for whatever reason, your finished. If you're making $5,000 per month in Adsense, there goes your entire monthly income. This is one of the reasons why I like being self employed, and having employees working under me. Your employees are expendable, but you are not. It doesn't matter how much you make at a job. As long as you work for someone, you are expendable, and are susceptible to being laid off. To be quite frank, I'm pissed off about the fact that I spent months working on my websites, and just because I let some time pass without updating them, my traffic has dropped, and so has my PR. I've made the most money from being an online freelancer and employer, and I have WAY security than I have by being reliant on the search engine. I would rather make $5,000 per month from 50 people than $5,000 per month in Adsense. I think I'm going to start investing my time and money on traffic building techniques that are not directly influenced by the search engines. Just as I would rather make $5,000 per month from 50 people rather than $5,000 per month from Adsense, I would rather get traffic from lots of sources rather than the three major search engines, which really are nothing but online monopolies. I would be willing to pay for information that could allow me to achieve this: traffic building methods that do not rely entirely on the three major SEs.
The problem is that 2 search engines have a near monopoly on web search between them and. Google alone has 80% and their share is growing. These SE's have huge clout. They can buy out any competition and spend millions on their PR departments. They also inhibit competion by telling you that you cannot place other ads on your page. G's PR department in particular has done a great job at rebuffing any criticism. I am truly astounded how they have been able squash and decent Anytime any webmaster expresses any concern you get other webmasters defending G. A company with around 80% share does not need any help. Surely, this situation cannot be good for the Internet. I would not want to live in a city where one company controlled 80% of TV or newspapers.
You're absolutely right, and in the offline brick and mortar world, this is exactly what you have. What power company controls New York state? Con Edison. What power company controls California and much of Nevada: Sierra Pacific. Guess what, both these companies are monopolies, and they offer poor service. New York has been notorious for black outs over the last couple of years. For those of you reading this who wonder what a power company has to do with Google, MSN, and Yahoo, the answer is this: when one company has too large of a share of the market, they are prone to corruption, and innovation becomes stagnant. Competitors are forced out. The Internet has historically been a great place to conduct business because it is a true free market. Anybody who worked hard enough, and who had the right info could make lots of money. The problem is, I fear that the Net is becoming just what the offline world is already: a place where a handful of companies own everything. I think Google may vary well ruin the Internet. I don't think there is a force in the offline world(even the government) that can take out the net, but Google is different, because their power is derived from the Internet. Google is a wildcard. But I firmly believe that if you use indirect traffic building methods, you can have a successful site with relying directly on Google. For example, instead of relying directly on Google to send traffic, why not get traffic from the websites that get lots of traffic from Google? When you do this, you are using a indirect method, and I think you are less dependent on the SEs.
I agree. I was lucky enough to be a webmaster when there were several search engines competing for searches and advertising. I miss those days.