arohan - 11:31 pm on Dec 30, 2012 (gmt 0)

Indyank, my traffic went down about 80% earlier this year when I was disproportionately dependent on Google organic visits. It is now up to only 40% less. Bulk of the gain has come from social media and related site referrals, although lately some Google organic referrals have picked up a little as well. Google now makes up about 30% of the total.

I have been advised by a former search executive (Lycos) to just ignore Google. His point is to do things that a normal business would do if search engines did not exist. At some point, when Google sees that you have a destination site and they are not presenting your site as a choice in the SERPs, they will figure out a way to fix their error.

This I suppose is a "brand bias" argument but implicit in this advice is that Google is trying to stay relevant to their users and they are doing this by showing the users what they are already comfortable with. That is why his suggestion was to focus more on social media (and other media) to establish your brand first. There is the whole possibility of large chunks of traffic migrating away from Google search and going directly to branded apps on smartphones and Windows 8 machines so Google does need to be nice to the brands if they are to stay relevant.

Looking at how the competitive threats to Google are shaping up, I now understand why hitching your wagon to Google is a bad idea in the long term (even if say, they were not messing around with rankings and algos). Search was just the teething phase of the internet when people wanted to go somewhere but did not know where and entire niches were unstaked. Now brands are taking control and search is going to be less relevant

To summarize (sorry for the longwindedness), from a long term perspective, I am not worried. However, it does hurt in the short term and if there is something quick I can do to fix the situation, I will do it. For now, I am ramping up my postings on other mainstream industry sites (fully authorship verified and linked from my g+ account) so I am expanding my brand awareness and letting Google know while I am doing it, so hopefully at some point in near future the buzz will be large enough for them to take notice.