The Google problem

If last week’s fuss over sudden loss of PageRank on many blogs proved anything, it’s that you shouldn’t put all your eggs in one basket.

Even though this particular change doesn’t seem to have affected search results, it does show that you can never rely on things staying the same. No matter how good your SEO skills, your ranking can drop over night if Google change their algorithms - or deliberately penalise you for doing something they don’t like.

The problem is, far too many of us rely entirely on Google. With well over 50% market share, we rely on them to send us search traffic. Many of us also use their AdWords system to advertise. And then we go and use AdSense to generate revenue and Analytics and Feedburner to measure our traffic.

Now I’m not saying Google is “evil”. But the fact is, they’re in business to make a profit. So it’s a little disconcerting when they make changes that seem to target competitors - people selling text links in this case. A drop in PageRank may have a minimal effect for most people, but what if Google decides to drop your site from search results altogether? Or ban you from AdSense?

The answer is simple… in theory: Diversify. Don’t rely on Google (or any single source) for sending you traffic, and for ad revenue.

In practice, it’s often not that easy. Google is by far the biggest source of both traffic and revenue for most publishers. But it always pays to look at other ways to make money.

Personally, I’m just waiting for the day when Google has real competition in Search. Despite having their fingers in many pots, search is still key to everything Google do, and right now they have a monopoly, which is never good for the rest of us.