travelin_cat - 1:54 pm on Oct 21, 2011 (gmt 0)

There is nothing free about organic traffic unless you're not in a competitive niche.

Sorry. Wrong. The traffic you receive is free in that it came to you with no cost at all. You must differentiate between the fixed costs that all website owners have and the income that the websites generate. One is a cost, the other is revenue.

It does not matter what you built your site to do, it could be about Malaysian worms and have 10,000 pages or it could be about a football team. All of these incur costs to create. But if you want to make money on a site, or more importantly, you NEED to make money to survive, you need traffic to your site.

If you need money, you can get it either organically, or pay for it. Many sites have no ROI with ads so they depend on organic traffic.... free traffic. When that traffic converts into income, it's free money. You've already created your site, now your are making money from free traffic, free traffic that you have NO control over.

You may do everything correct to get Google to send you traffic, but what happens when somebody else does a better job? What happens when 5 or 6 people do a better job? You can't tell Google to put you in a better position above them. You can't tell Google anything.

Again, think about the future. Do you really think you will be on the first page forever? If you do, you are doomed to fail.

The reason this "free traffic" is gone for real, quality businesses (if they were hit by Panda) is because Google has totally screwed up with their machine learning layer on top of the algo. It's because Google is irresponsibly running tests that have dramatic and UNKNOWN affects on real businesses and lives. They have tremendous power, and they're abusing it.

You just made my point with that statement. Does it matter WHY Google did what they did? Who cares? They stopped giving you free traffic. They stopped feeding your money machine with their free gasoline. They have the power to do as they will and you willingly and knowingly allowed it to happen.

Stop thinking about if the traffic is free or not and think about what you can do to get other traffic. If there is nothing you can do, as was my case, then you should get out of your business model.