How many of you entirely depend on Google for survival?

[irock]

We all know Google traffic account for a lot of our revenue, but how many of you here are totally depend on Google... say for example, if Google ranks dropped, you instantly lose 40% of the revenue. My content site, which gets 80% of the visitors from SE, survives on Google traffic.

Any comments?

[fathom]

How many of you entirely depend on Google for survival?

Hopefully none.

I one hit wonder is rather useless for sustainability.

[javascripter]

ah. I did the metatags for <snip> and placed a hit counter at the bottom for everyones enjoyment about 6 months ago. There you can see in detail by clicking on the sitemeter how incredibly effective Google has been. In May, we were getting about 3 hits a day average. Usually two hits were from me uploading the site. The other, some random accident. I optimized the site, submitted it, and it took off 30 days later. Since then, some days, I get almost 400 hits. That's a lot from only 3. It made a huge difference in sales. That's 400 less cold calls our sales team had to do. Right after I finished the website and got them into Google and Yahoo, they layed me off knowing I had done what was needed.

Fortunately, they don't know how to remove certain things from the site, including my hit counter. They are clueless.

Javascripter!

[edited by: Marcia at 10:02 am (utc) on Dec. 30, 2002]
[edit reason] no specifics please, per forum charter and TOS [/edit]

[javascripter]

And yes, they completely rely on mostly Google....and some Yahoo.

[mosley700]

"And yes, they completely rely on mostly Google....and some Yahoo."
Um. Google=Yahoo.

[javascripter]

Ah, I submitted them to Yahoo separately. I hope that blurt of yours wasn't meant to be condescending. Submitting to Yahoo separately if done correctly puts them at number one in Yahoo even before the Yahoo/Google listings. Did you know that?

[javascripter]

I don't think you did.

[Powdork]

I manage a restaurant and its website along with a wedding website on the side. I also SEO for several regional companies. Obviously, the restaurant would survive without its website but it does receive 70-80% of its SE traffic (banquet biz mostly) from Google-Y!-AOL-Netscape and other 'powered by Googles'. The wedding website is only two months old and currently receives most of its SE traffic through MSN via a zeal listing. I will be sending out original bills to the clients on the site in mid January based on current traffic and referrals and those projected when fully Googlized. Googles rankings will have the most significant effect on what i can charge. The nice thing about it is that will encourage me to go out and get relevant links. More times than not the referrals from these links outweigh the benefits derived from extra page rank or link text. This helps to reduce dependence on Google. The SEO work I have done has been all Google. The companies have improved for all keyword phrases and have nearly doubled relevant SE traffic over three months. This comes during a normal seasonal downturn (I was helped immensely when in the middle of the Google gains Y! misplaced their Directory compounding my successes).:) While that category was 100% Google dependent, it's not the type of thing where I would suffer if Google dropped the sites (presuming it wasn't a result of my actions).

[Total Paranoia]

Google gives most trafic to every site I have made, but then it would do seems as though Google/Yahoo control apx 70% of worldwide searches carried out.

I do depend on the internet for survival but not google.

Some of my clients may have become dependant on it, but I am sure they would all survive without google as they did once before.

[vitaplease]

but how many of you here are totally depend on Google...

not totally but a lot.

How many of you have hired an extra guy because of the traffic Google is giving you? Are you getting dependant?

(If you have not hired an extra guy because of Google traffic, read here) [webmasterworld.com] ;)

[javascripter]

I clicked on that read here just to see what it was....Even this late at night I can still get a good laugh. haha

[fathom]

I suppose I should clarify my initial response.

Search engines (google) develops first time visitors/customers... more specifically once only visitors/customers.

If you have a web site (highly ranked) today's traffic should be tomorrow "loyal markets".

If however, all or most of these are just "once only visitors/customers" the fault lies within your marketability and not Google dominance.

Google and all other search engines "will change" to meet market demand, this is guaranteed.

If your market demand relies totally on Google you are not motivating visitors, customers to return, to refer others, to hold you as a reliable and trustworthy vendor... and no hope for the future.

[mosley700]

"Ah, I submitted them to Yahoo separately. I hope that blurt of yours wasn't meant to be condescending. Submitting to Yahoo separately if done correctly puts them at number one in Yahoo even before the Yahoo/Google listings. Did you know that?"

No, I didn't. Do you have to belong to a secret club to get there? Please provide a link to the Yahoo SERPs where your site is "at number one in Yahoo even before the Yahoo/Google listings". Send it to [e-mail]
I'm very, very curious to see this.

[drako]

My main site (a dutch site) gets ± 20% of all visitors from Google, 20% from Ilse (dutch searchengine) and 10% from other searchengines. The remaining 50% comes from ± 15 good quality content sites who were kind enough to link to me.......

I think google is slowly giving me more visitors every month, climbing to 25 %

[vitaplease]

another dependancy question I ask myself:

How many of the unasked for links towards my site came through webmasters finding my content/pages through Google..

[makemetop]

>How many of the unasked for links towards my site came through webmasters finding my content/pages through Google..

Very good point! Here I was feeling OK until you pointed this out. Although I'm not totally dependent on Google for traffic - I bet a large proportion of unsolicited links have come from visibility on Google. Some more research called for!

[fathom]

another dependancy question I ask myself:

How many of the unasked for links towards my site came through webmasters finding my content/pages through Google.

Actually I see this as much or more from DMOZ referrals.

[vitaplease]

>I bet a large proportion of unsolicited links have come from visibility on Google

Just to top it off:

How much of that visibility came from my unique content.

and how much of that "unique" content of my site has been assembled through Google..

[IanTurner]

We're not Google dependent - the traffic is nice and means that we can develop our business, but we still have other marketing irons in the fire.

At the moment Google provides the best ROI so it is the area we concentrate on. Given no Google we would place much more emphasis on the techniques giving the next best ROI.

MSN is good, as is local networking (offline technique)

We could probably survive even if the public internet disappeared.

[edit_g]

One of the best thing about Google traffic is that you know that they're interested. They searched for what they wanted and found your site- if your site is relevant to the search they carried out then you have 1 person ready to buy right there. Thats the beauty of search- targeted traffic. I would rather have 50 Google referrals than 250 referrals from a link on a portal site.

Back to the thread- I thought that our sites were completely dependent on Google but when one of them got pr 0'ed around 5 months ago I was expecting to deal with a huge hole in our business sources. But, no, everything worked out ok. We were not as dependent on Google as we thought- we just focused on other avenues- and we are still doing good without them. Getting back in would be a bonus, but not a critical issue.

[ikbenhet1]

I depend for 40%-50% on google & Yahoo's free listings.

The rest comes from paid submissions like AV, Adwords, and a bunch of other sites.

[Dynamoo]

72% of my main site traffic is from Google, Google-powered SEs or national Googles.
7% is from MSN.
6% is from all other SEs.
16% is direct referrals (5% from one host).

In other words, if I get dropped by Google I'm completely stuffed.

I've gone down the Inktomi, Zeal, Findwhat, Kanoodle and ODP routes but the traffic doesn't exactly amount to a whole hill of beans.

[shady]

My main site:
I used to receive around 20% from yahoo.co.uk directory and 75% from google.......
Now 95% google listings (including yagoogle) and very scared as it is now my main income!

[jaeden]

Well, put it this way. Before Yahoo started showing Google's results, I was number one for my keyword, and was getting about 35 orders a day. Then when they merged, my listings fell to number 4, and it went down to 20 or so a day. Then when Google made it's algo change in late October, my site dropped to number 13. I'm now at number 8 and are barely scraping 10 orders a day.

I keep trying to get my company to help me with marketing in other areas, but they just aren't listening. I'm not sure we are going to make it.

BTW, Javascripter. This I gotta hear too. How can my results be listed in Yahoo before the Googles results. I used to be number 1, now I'm not. How can I get back there? Sticky me if you have too.

[dougs]

Hello all

I have been a keen reader, user of the info on this site, known by some of you, but never participated in the site, well the New Year is upon us.....

It seems very obvious from this thread that most people are getting lots of business from google, great, but scary. I have two trains of though:

Milk google for everything you can now, as one day the rules will change. Accept that this is how it is and your eggs are all in one basket, but the google spider controls your revenue. Get in quick, make your money and get out.

The second option is to try everything else to get traffic, that is not google associated. ie ppc's, inktomi, affiliates, etc, etc. One day the rules will change and you wil win some and loose others, but your business will continue on.

Either option is viable, as long as you accept the risks. My personal preference is the second one, it allows me not to care, THAT MUCH, what happens with google.

Have a good one and thanks for all the great info.

Doug

[zeus]

Well if Google droped our site we are out of business, we get about 80% of our visits from Google.

So everytime it is dance time we get totaly nuts and hope for the best.

zeus

[JimBobMcCalister]

I would lose about 50%, as I get the other 50% mostlyfrom MSN, and some from AltaVista. Strange change I have noticed: my inboundlink data in the past (this time last year) disappeared from the Google index, and I lost mytraffic from them almost completely. The same thing happened this year, but I havent lost any traffic(?). I still come up number one in some great search terms/phrases, and in the top ten for several others.

[jamesyap]

I have more than 50% of my visitors come from google and its partners that are powered by google.

[dougs]

Keep taking the relaxant drugs is all I can suggest:)

[fathom]

The key is how many Google referrals compared to how many direct or favicon referrals.

Clearly a new site would normally have limited direct or favicon referrals thus developing Google referrals (and others) is extremely important.

But over time if your direct or favicon referrals do not improve something is wrong.

If Google is producing 80% of your new visitation this is exceptional unless that same 80% is for total visitation. Few businesses can sustain "once only" for very long.