diberry - 4:19 pm on Dec 18, 2012 (gmt 0)

I'm not seeing any big changes in rankings lately as some of you have been, but I am continuing to see long tail search phrases for words that don't actually appear on my site, but do reflect the precise concept on my page. In other words, my pages are totally relevant to what the searcher is looking for, despite not using the same words the searcher used. I'm neither a fan nor a hater of Google, but I have to say I'm impressed with this. I remember longing for a day when you didn't have to use the most searched words on your page in order to get found, and it looks like we may be on the cusp of it.

I think we are lucky, this has made us stronger, we were too dependent on google and they showed us what a mistake that was. Now, a year later, we are stronger, strong enough that google can not kill us, hurt yes, kill no. Next year we hurt them.

Applause! This is the way more of us need to be looking at it. I'm not in direct competition with Google, but all of my sites rely on Google for only 30% of their traffic or less. The one site that got Penguinized had relied on Google for more like 60-70% of its traffic, but Google decimated that. Since then I've spent *some* time trying to figure out what I did to get Penguinished, but I've spent considerably more time building my site through other avenues of promotion. I'd love to get all my Google traffic back one day, but I don't ever want it to make up 70% again. (Nor do I want any other source to be that kind of majority - sometimes it can't be avoided, but it's never an ideal situation.)