europeforvisitors - 2:54 pm on May 10, 2007 (gmt 0)

Mattg3 wrote:

And webmasters are giving away a free commodity free content free work free ideas ... :)

Let's be realistic: How many pages on the Web are even worth indexing? How many of those pages have intrinsic value for a search engine's audience? Google could discard 90% of its index, and most users wouldn't notice or care.

Anybodies Internet business is affected by Google. So its your decision if you just want to be a Google outpost forever Good luck ...

The "Google outposts" are the SEO-driven sites that have little of intrinsic value to offer the reader, and which depend solely on Google and other search engines for traffic because they can't attract traffic from other sites, repeat readers, or repeat customers.

Trinorthlighting wrote:

I think it’s funny, what did all these people do before the web? Do they really expect everything to come for free? If Google gives you free traffic you should appreciate it. If you do not get free traffic, there is always advertising.

There's also word-of-mouth and repeat business. I regularly order a hard-to-get Belgian chocolate product for my wife through a small business that handles its transactions via Yahoo. The business ships orders quickly and goes out of its way to satisfy the customer . (For example, when a five-pack wasn't available, it shipped five single packs at the five-pack price.) I buy from this small company several times a year. I don't know if the business needs Google to survive, but it certainly doesn't need Google as much as, say, a pure-play chocolate affiliate site that brings nothing but SEO skills to the party.