max_mm - 2:12 am on Feb 8, 2005 (gmt 0)

WebFusion said:

My question is...how on earth can you stand to live like that? Having your livelhood resting in the hands of an entity over which you have no control is (IMHO) madness. I think you people are looking at this the wrong way. As opposed to checking various datacenters every few minutes, why not use that time more wsely to pursue other sources of traffic IN CASE your google traffic does not come back anytime soon. Where will you be a week from now if you've wasted all this time checking and rechecking to see if your site came back? No better off than you are now! It's like asking a stranger to hold your rope while you rappel off a cliff!

WebFusion, how do you determine most of us did not diversify or are not putting enough time to other things or more attention to other SE like yahoo or MSN.

Well guess what…I for one did. I have a network of web sites and they are all listed (and rank well) on MSN as well as Yahoo. I gave up Google optimisation a long while ago due to them freak spikes in traffic from this engine. It is just not reliable as it used to be SERPs wise and one can not relay his/hers business model upon such seismic events/updates.

My problem and I’m sure the problem of many other webmasters is the fact that there are still far too many average joe’s out there that start their web searches with google. Why do they start their searches with google? because of all the media hype and because most of us webmasters have been recommending google to our users and we are partly to blame for google’s success and power over our site traffic & businesses.

I wont count the times I recommended friends and family to search google when they are looking for something online. Most were just using whatever default engine set up in their browsers and had no idea about google. I cannot count the times I helped friends family and customers change the default engines installed or help them install the google tool bar.

So no WebFusion, this is not a matter of “I’m not ranking well on google lets ban googlebot”.
It is a matter of “we are giving this monopoly too much power, power they no longer deserve” and we should stop recommending them as the default engine to our users.

Rest assured that my business is fully diversified and my sites rank very well over Y and MSN. But I’m only getting 50% of traffic I used to get. Google accounted for the other 50%. Why there is not as much traffic coming from the other two is simply because twice as much users (WW) are using google as their default SE.

I went even further today and started offering direct links to Y toolbar over my entire network.

My sites are not entirely reliant on SE traffic and I still get a large amount of viewers coming via links etc. It is my motto now to start recommending the other SEs to my viewers and will continue doing this when the recent G update settles down and I get my G traffic back (and i've been more then 8 years in this business to know that the traffic will recover, the question is when?). I’ll be busy recommending the other engines to that traffic as well, when it is back.

You talk about true diversifications, this is one of the first steps we webmasters should take to ensure the web is a fair play ground for everyone, short and long term. Webmasters should start by stop recommending google on their sites. It only comes back to haunt us later on down the track.

Seams like where ever site you visit nowadays has the google box or google adsense.......that’s what I’m talking about. They are simply rounding up the entire web and this must stop.

[edited by: max_mm at 2:41 am (utc) on Feb. 8, 2005]