econman - 9:31 pm on Jun 7, 2007 (gmt 0)

These are curious times for the internet, the traffic flow is so tightly funnelled, right now,

That's the key point.

Google's controls something like 80% of all the traffic from "new" visitors -- those who searching for something in a particular niche for the first (perhaps the only) time.

So, if you are in one of those niches which require exposure to casual/new surfers, its pretty much impossible to succeed without succeeding in Google.

Given Google's algorithms, that means, you need lots of links that are both "trusted" and "natural".

But, if you have a relatively new site it's virtually impossible to obtain enough highly trustworthy, purely "natural" links. And without those links, you can't move high enough up the SERPs to have your site seen by very many people -- and thus you can't start attracting many of those "natural" links.

So, most sites are forced to do something "unnatural" like offering to reciprocate, or purchasing a few ads, or sending out emails, etc.

What makes all of this especially difficult is that there are tradeoffs -- do you spend your time and money on building a better site, or promoting the site, or try to do both and run the risk of failing at both?

If you mostly focus on building a great site, you'll find it difficult to generate any traffic regardless of how great your site is, because you'll be competing with all those "thin" sites, "fake" sites, "scraped" sites and "black hat throwaway" sites -- all of which focus their resources on moving up the SERPs by whatever means has the best ROI -- say, buying 1,000's of "unnatural" links.

And, of course, you'll also be competing with all the deeply entrenched sites that were launched many years ago, that have built up plenty of "trust" and "natural" links back in the good old days.

My suspicion is that Google realizes this -- and that's one reason why their guidelines continue to be a bit vague. They can't stop displaying every site they catch running a few advertisements without "no follow" tags, or that trade links with other sites in hopes of moving up a notch or two in the SERPs. Because, if they really cracked down, the collateral damage would be enormous -- they would end up killing off way too many good quality sites.

But, I could be wrong -- maybe they plan to tighten the noose, so that no new sites will survive without buying a truckload of traffic from Adwords. With this much traffic funneling through a single entity, it makes for some very "interesting times" for everyone else.