Thanks ma’am! You DO matter, you have a huge following that believes in you. Now, besides the website stuff you’ve talked about, I have 2 ideas I’d like to discuss with you; do you have an eBook on Kindle? I’m ready to start a series of short stories (fiction) and sell them on Amazon. It’s totally “outside the Google Box” because you don’t use keywords, there’s a completely different way of placing your product. And second; Yahoo is tanking and needs an image re-make desperately. They need a vision, a purpose, a loyal following. Do you have any contacts at Yahoo? It would be fun to work with you on a user requirements project to build out the world of niche article marketing within a section of Yahoo, where we could register, be reviewed and registered, not be blacklisted. Like a Yahoo sponsored DMOZ within Yahoo, listing blogs made by real people. (No scrapers allowed! No crappy eHow that just steals content from 4 different sites and regurgitates it like baby bird food!) Wouldn’t that be fun? Adversity is the misunderstood key to success. The kick in the rear with the pointy toed boot!

No… they won’t, because negative seo has a little impact on big site (amazon, ebay etc) and they don’t really care about small / medium sites. Doing so, they force you to buy PPC. It’s a win win situation for google.

Google sucks.

https://plus.google.com/112127291830325669645/posts/METB8iqtubX

I agree we have to start looking for other ways to reach our target audience. They are out there and finding new traffic sources are the key to staying in business.

I would love to hear your thoughts on alternative traffic sources.

Good point, about having a good site doing well in the ranks and then a hacking takes place. One of my sites got dropped that way and it never recovered after that no matter what I did. And to think it was no fault of mine. From then on, I decided not put all my eggs in the Google basket. Very dangerous.

I feel this is what is happening with Google. For some reason they feel that webmasters are the problem when in reality Google’s overly aggressiveness towards us and their lack of effort in the customer service department is the real problem.

I believe if there is one thing that may cause Google to loose their power is the fact that they choose to not provide any type of helpful customer service.

(especially in the adsense department where people are getting banned left and right.)

Also agree 100% relying one one thing as your main source of income is not only a bad move but a very risky one at that. As I mentioned many people have lost their adsense account of many years just because “Google decides” to do so. This is not a real business because us the supposedly “business owners” have no real control.

This was a very tough lesson to learn but My partner and I did learn it indeed. Anyways thanks again for the excellent post! I enjoyed it.

In fact, you can get all the traffic you ever need without a single visitor from Google, just by putting yourself in front of the target market in other places.

That may be forums, or newsletters or social media, but in fact niche markets do not not congregate on via google, so to focus exclusively on google bypasses such a chunk of potential.

Great post!
Gordon

You’re probably right, but we can always hope!

Would be an interesting day if he DID add a search engine to FB, wouldn’t it?

I was also thinking that Facebook will probably be another way to get targeted traffic because FB advertising is based on pretty specific demographics. Plus with the Facebook IPO going public May 17th, Mark Zuckerberg will be able to use all that money from the shareholders to turn Facebook into a (search engine) if he wants to.

So sorry to hear all that, Mike…but things have GOT to get better (with the housing market)…hopefully you’ll be back smelling dirt very soon.

Always great to hear from YOU too!

Thankfully, I didn’t get a ‘wake up call’ like that. I just realized how much of my time and energy was spent watching Google…..and it was a LOT of time. Hopefully, this was more like a ‘proactive wakeup call’ for me.

So, Eddy, you want the dirt on who I’ll be in my NEXT relationship with?? hahhaha! I thought nice girls never told?

Knowing me, I’ll spill it eventually!

Hope to see ya in Vegas!!

Ouch, Gracie! That sure hurts when Google puts the hammer down like that!

Glad things are picking up for you!