Can you survive Google's shrinking serps?

[goodroi]

Google keeps changing its serps. Google has more adwords advertisers today than it did 15 years ago so there are more ads taking up space. Google has also added local listings, images, videos, news headlines, shopping and other results to their search results. Many of these changes have resulted in less traffic flowing to the organic web results. Before you could rank #3 or #4 and still appear above the page fold. Now the #3 or #4 position can fall below the page fold.

As a Google stockholder I know first-hand that Google is a for-profit business. It would be silly if a for-profit company turned off advertising because webmasters wanted more unpaid traffic. It is not just a common sense money grab that shrinks the serps. If I was Google and noticed the user is searching a local address, I would show local listings above non-geographic web results. So for multiple reasons I don't see why Google will reverse this trend just because us webmasters want unpaid web traffic from Google.

Do you think webmasters can survive Google's shrinking serps? Make sure to explain yourself.


Mods Note: Many people feel that Google sucks, is a monopoly, kills businesses, has a bad algo, always lie, and are just mean & bad people. I think that covers the more popular Google complaints so now we can keep this thread on-topic with productive posts and don't be surprised when us moderators delete the generic complaining & non-productive noise.

[diberry]

Some thousands per day? From social media? I doubt it can be reached.

Sure it can. My best performing site gets thousands a day from social media sites, more than I get from Google. It's always been that way, and that's fine by me. I worry more about social media sites "turning on me" somehow than I do about Google.

[londrum]

there's loads of stuff you can do that doesn't go anywhere near a search engine. i used to write wordpress plugins, which ended up on other sites (i dont do that anymore, but it got a load of traffic). you can put together little ebooks of your site's subject too, and sell them for free in the apple store, and on amazon (i haven't personally tried amazon yet)
maybe you could put together some podcasts, if that fits your subject.
i'v been thinking of making an app too, for iphone and ipad, but i haven't got around to learning how to do it yet.
and i've got a sizeable amount of traffic from facebook and twitter as well, like loads of other people. most of my facebook and twitter stuff is automated, and is pulled straight from my site, so it's next to no work for me, but it still brings in the traffic.
you just need to branch out a bit, and try other techniques. most of them aren't as hard or as daunting as they might at first seem

[EditorialGuy]

My best performing site gets thousands a day from social media sites, more than I get from Google.

For my topic, "social media" traffic is mostly waste circulation. I earn a lot more revenue from people who are actively researching how to spend their money. Those are the readers who click on AdSense ads and make affiliate purchases.