steerpikegg - 8:19 pm on Jun 2, 2010 (gmt 0)

It's like looking at 'flash flood area' on a sign in the desert

But surely with Google, there would be no sign :)

Joking aside though, I appreciate what you say about not basing your livelihood on Google traffic, however if a site IS doing well due to serps, it's very hard not to form plans around this especially when things have been stable for many years.

In the UK, from what I see Google has around a 80-90% monopoly over other search engines. My site ranks very well in Bing and Yahoo, but still sees a pitiful amount of traffic, so no matter what other contingencies are in place, a drop from Google is no trivial matter.

I am not suggesting that Google should inform in detail of the algo changes as such, but just a heads up that 'we are making some very major changes which could affect long tail searches, so be prepared'

I know that Google makes a large amount of minor changes all the time, but I have never seen such a dramatic algo change without any prior info. From what I remember, we were discussing Big Daddy for a long time before it happened, and similarly with Caffeine (not an algo change I know) we knew about it a long time in advance.