AG4Life - 2:45 am on Oct 21, 2011 (gmt 0)

Relying on a single source for your visitors is always dangerous, the same applies for brick and mortar businesses as well, but Google was so dominant, and it was so much easier for the smaller guys to compete against the big guys and scrapers, so a lot of it wasn't down to choice or anything. A lot of us, me included, did take Google traffic for granted, and that was our mistake.

I'm also starting a few more websites that won't be reliant on Google traffic, and I think a lot of webmasters are doing the same. And it's all thanks to Panda for informing us what we should have known already, that Google is not reliable enough of a "business partner", mainly because they're not in business *with* us (often competing against us website owners, actually).

And if webmasters succeed in weaning off Google's teat, then that may very well be Google search's undoing, as they too have a lot to lose if webmasters stop jumping through their hoops.