taberstruths - 1:25 am on Jan 7, 2013 (gmt 0)

Personally I saw the folly of relying on Google 8 months ago when Penguin rolled out. Luckily I had enough loyal followers and fans that it didn't cremate us. At that point I focused on social networking, syndication on sites with higher PR than us in the same niche, and niche specific forums and bookmarking sites. Today Scroogle is only 1/3 of our traffic vs. 90% however we are almost back to pre penguin levels of traffic. Today we get over 1000 shares of one kind or another from social networks, 20+ free unsolicited backlinks from blogs, paper.li links, and people placing our banner and link on their sites per day. It was harder work at first building our reputation and awareness than just looking to please Google but today it is 1000 times easier and cheaper than it ever was doing it the old way.