Kareem - 1:13 pm on Jun 7, 2003 (gmt 0)

Hey Essex_boy you are not alone. I remember getting a similar wake up call from Google some time back when most of my sites were enjoying great rankings on G. That time we were doing absoultely great in terms of traffic and sales. Then all of a sudden something happened after an update. PR of 3 of my sites was slashed dramatically for reasons still unknown to me (my guess is that sites were interlinked and somehow one or more of the sites became part of a bad neighborhood).

As a result down went the traffic and with it the revenues. My livelihood and that of my few employees was on the line. We were barely breathing from traffic from other sources. That's when I realized that I had relied too heavily on traffic from Google and that I should have diversified my sources of traffic even while enjoying good traffic from google. As a netpreneur I realized that no fundamentally sound web business model should rely too heavily on just one (or two) source(s) of traffic for their revenues. And, as an engineer who had always chosen to be self employed and never worked for a company ever, there was no going back. I HAD to make it work. I knew I wasn't giving up.

That's when I went back to the drawing board to devise a strategy for survival (without Google) while at the same time trying to regain my lost positions in G. I have to admit that was the time of most learning for me, spending 14 to 16 hours each day in front of my computer trying to work it all out. It seemed as if a well-established netpreneur (from a few weeks back) had to learn it all over again.

Finally I was able to devise a strategy and guess who was the savior again? you guessed right; the big G. I sharpened my skills on Excel and immersed myself in a sea of keywords, developing individual (innovative) adwords campaigns for all the sites that had fallen; with my biggest campaign containing close to 10,000 keywords. Even adwords I realized then is a science in itself, and if approached properly could be (surprisingly) profitable, though nothing is as profitable as the free clicks.

Careful study of my campaigns and my ROI gave me a pretty good idea of how much profit I was making and the amount of time I was buying to bounce back. It also gave the workers confidence that the company they were working for was still in business. Adwords campaign coupled with an Overture campaign helped keep my business afloat until slowly but surely things started to take a turn. After making adjustments over a couple of updates and implementing wiser linking strategies, I found my sites creeping up in search results and regaining some of their lost PR.

Now when the dust has settled, not only are my sources of traffic diversified, but I feel as if I have gained so much more. In this (web) medium of fluctuating fortunes, I feel a tad bit safer. Btw, revenues are up and profits are back, and this time I feel and believe it is for real :)

Glad you've decided not to throw in the towel, as "what doesn't kill you only makes you stronger".

With good advice in this forum combined with some faith and confidence in your ability, you can pretty much accomplish anything on the web.

Good Luck.

Kareem