simonmc - 1:20 pm on Jun 5, 2006 (gmt 0)

Pages missing, pages coming back, rankings bouncing all over the place. Sometimes in and sometimes out.

These points just prove that even if you are doing well in google, you are at their mercy. The search results they provide are unstable for the webmaster.

It is all very well saying lets pick ourselves up and learn from our mistakes and move forward, but you can't do that with any certainty because you are completely at the whim of google.

The way to move forward here is to diversify. Change your business model so that you can get traffic from other places. Make it so that any traffic that you get from the search engines is just a bonus. It may be gone again tomorrow. Don't rely on it.

Google will always be like they are now. They are just over engineered and that means the smallest change they make here or there can have devasting effects on where your site ranks.