Search engine independence

[jason77]

i always thought, when a website reaches a certain size, it could live without being indexed in any search engines.

however, ebay does still do plenty of advertising...

so it is impossible to get a website beyong a certain level so that it will just live by word of mouth?

[MarkHutch]

Maybe, but few businesses stand still. The law of motion is that you are either moving forward or falling behind. Everyone has heard of "Coke", but I see their ads on Tv all the time.

This reminds me of a story I heard once about a junior executive that was flying across the country with the President of the Hershey Chocolate Company. This young employee ask the President why he spent millions of dollars on advertising when his company was already number one in Chocolate sales. The President of the company just smiled and said, "because I want to STAY number one".

Something to think about.

[Lord Majestic]

The President of the company just smiled and said, "because I want to STAY number one".

A lot of high profile TV ads are a complete waste of money in terms of sales, but they make up good brand and help make exclusive arrangements that actually drive sales.

I think these days it is more of CEO do not want to take unortodox risk of stopping ads just in case companies lose sales -- it can and does happen anyway, but CEOs rather not have it blamed on this "new" strategy, they would rather blow lots of money on TV, but nobody will be able to say he did not do it and attribute fall in sales to it: this is because big companies are very risk averse (sp?).

Now when talking about search engines situation is a bit different -- search engines have big updates once in a while, so high rank today may mean lost rank tomorrow. Plus it is a good idea to diversify and get more and more pages that get bits of traffic, together making up a huge traffic flow.

[bostonBeans]

Really depends on who your users are and what you consider enough to 'live'. When I watch people use search engines, I see them use it as both a discovery tool AND a navigation tool. I want to find site X so I use Keyword Y in search engine Z. The user knows the site they want, but uses the search engine to navigate to the site. I see this happening more and more often. Based on this alone, it could be dificult to ween a site off the search engines.

-bB