Is it safe to build a business completely reliant on free Google traffic?

[3Six]

[[Thread split from Flippa is now doing due diligence for you - Clinton]]

LOL, that's funny. There's a joker there at the SP thread who says he makes $200K a month from free traffic. I love it when they make these numbers up to try and sound important/knowledgeable. He invites readers to see why it's good to rely on free taffic- a one hour+ video on his site!

It's lovely to have Google traffic but the average Flippa buyer hasn't seen a major Google upheaval and the havoc it can cause with even well established sites with hundreds of employees. They likely never heard of Florida, for example, which was a Google algo change that made mainstream news because it put so many businesses out of operation. And there were others and others and others

But, it's not just major Google updates. Here are some examples of dumb businesses that didn't recognise the risks early enough.
My six year old business has gone under (when Google decided it didn't like directories any more)
A senior member at webmasterworld says:

If you only have one site and are relying on free traffic to make an income from that site, then perhaps you need to reconsider your business model instead of blaming all of your problems on Google.

And several other senior members agree with her.
I've realised that free = not guaranteed (webmasterworld)
Google has killed me (Sitepoint)
Unexpected Google downtime affects millions of businesses Searchenginejournal and article at Sitepoint

With Caffeine and EverFlux rankings are even less reliable now than they were before, but your rankings can tank not just because of Google algo changes. Black hat SEOs can and do sometimes shoot their sites up to the top of the rankings and push genuine sites down. It's not just blackhat SEOs. Sometimes good sites come along that are more worthy than yours. Can you guarantee that nobody will even build a site in your niche that is better than yours? When Wikipedia came along it pushed a lot of previously top sites out of the first place in SERPs for years and years.

Google has been known to take manual action when it doesn't like something your site's doing. Who knows - tomorrow they could take your site down because they don't like the exact wording of your privacy policy or suspect that you are buying/selling text links!
Google bans BWM's website - CNET. Remember, it's their search engine, they can do what they want with it.

The smallest on-site error could cause you to drop out of SERPs as well. For those who don't remember the canonical problems of www and non-www (newbies won't know what that is) - top quality sites dropped out of the rankings permanently because a long time ago they made a tiny mistake that could have been fixed in 30 seconds. Mistakes elsewhere in your htaccess, your robots.txt or even caused by your host can drop you out of the rankings.

But Sitepoint and Flippa would like you to continue believing that it's safe to invest all your money on a site that's 100% reliant on Google.

[benitez17]

It's not wise to build a business completely reliant on anything. I use several webhosts, 2 DNS hosts, a few registrars, multiple ad networks, and have sites with several different business models. This way, if something goes wrong with a single source, my business can continue without taking too much of a hit.

Google is probably one of the worst entities to depend on because they make major changes often and you have no real recourse if they decide to take action against your site specifically for some reason.

Just one example that is fresh in my mind is this blog network, which had its revenue cut by nearly 50% after Google's last update that changed their algorithm for long tail keyword searches and the network lost a significant amount of traffic. Of course, the seller didn't mention that in the listing, and he was insistent that traffic was going to come right back when I discussed it with him on DP.

Also, I wasn't aware that only the following reasons existed for having a website:

1. Lead Generation (Get the phone to ring, ppl to walk into your bricks 'n' mortar store, or fill our a contact form)
2. E-commerce site
3. Online Membership site. (To me this includes forums sites like this)

Apparently, blogs, Wikipedia, evergreen content sites, and plenty of other types of informative, useful sites should not exist in this person's mind. It's hard to take any other information from a person who makes comments like that seriously, even though I think he gives some good advice later in his post about determining the best source for new customers and using that to gain customers and build your business.

[hooperman]

Is it safe to build a business completely reliant on free Google traffic?

Is it b*llocks!

Yes, people do do that, but it's not safe, for all the reasons you point out above. Rankings and traffic can plummet overnight, they aren't guaranteed. Some of my sites have a huge reliance on Google searches and I hate that. That's something I need to sort out.

It's fine if you want to create a business based on Google rankings provided you know the risk. But knowing the risk doesn't make it safe, and people who appreciate the risk (Flippa)certainly shouldn't try to fool newbs into thinking it is safe. That lots of people are making money from free Google traffic doesn't mean their businesses are safe. Their revenue could dry up overnight. All you have to do is spend 5 minutes in an SEO forum to see a large number of webmasters crying about their loss of rankings --> traffic --> earnings. "Why have I lost my rankings, I just can't understand it?!". Why not ask them if their business model of relying on a free but very erratic source of traffic was a good long term plan?

[Clinton]

Interesting happenings over at SP and I've no doubt they started the thread to try and get some support for the idea that sites almost completely reliant on Google for free traffic aren't any more risky than other sites. In fact, given the preponderance of sites in Flippa where the main selling point is SERPs ranking, it wouldn't suit Flippa very well if balance of opinion veered towards the truth.

But it's not just Google free traffic that's enormously risky. Even Google PPC is. Recently Google nuked thousands of PPC accounts for apparently no reason. There was no warning and there was no appeal process. Some webmasters who thought they had a safer model for the traffic that underpinned their earnings suddenly found their businesses completely and utterly bust. They weeped and wailed in numerous webmaster forums and some argued that as they were spending millions they deserved better treatment but, hey, Google doesn't take these things personally. They have algos for everything and if an algorithm decides it doesn't like your Adsense or Adwords account you die. If the algo finds something on your site that you think is perfectly OK but the algo doesn't ... you drop out of the SERPs.

Building a business that's mainly reliant on any form of Google traffic or revenue is like investing a lot of money building a site on someone else's domain - like blogger or squidoo.

My experience with quality sites is the natural position long established sites settle into include less than 30% of free Google traffic. When I'm buying sites, my inclination is to start discounting after that figure. To me - and as a rough guide - an established web business (worth say $50K+) that gets more than 30% of its traffic from Google is "over-optimised" and ripe for some flattening.

Sellers are usually very proud of their SEO efforts and are very forward with disclosing how well they've done. I find that extremely useful. While they think their optimising increases the value of their site, I encourage them to talk about the SEO so I can find out just how much of that free traffic from SEs is as a result of a rank artificially boosted by the seller working his ass off creating links, making forum posts to get his signature seen, sending tweets, engaging in other activity that I have no intention of continuing.

I then decide what discount I'm applying to the valuation for all that work he's done

How does high rankings in SERPS affect your valuation of a prospective buy?

[Ajeet]

Any business person can answer the basic question: Surely you should not bank on an ever-changing, not-in-your-control algorithm.

But I think that we are missing an important point here. For most people; the bottom of the pyramid; it is possible to build small SE traffic based sites but not possible to set up sites that get other traffic (say affiliate, direct, etc). So, I think that the entry barriers at the lower end is lower for search engine traffic sites. I know many webpreneurs (assuming that is a word), that depend on Google for traffic, but do not want to.

[Clinton]

PS: 3Six, you say in the SP thread that you posted here for a reason. You're right - we don't censor posts / delete them out of fear they'll affect the balance sheet. It's great not having a balance sheet to worry about!

I hope they don't censor that post of yours.

[riosbrad]

Wouldn't the best type of business be one that doesn't get any free traffic because that would mean it doesn't have good SEO and it would be easy to get some free traffic to increase the earnings?

[benitez17]

Wouldn't the best type of business be one that doesn't get any free traffic because that would mean it doesn't have good SEO and it would be easy to get some free traffic to increase the earnings?

Possibly. It could be that the business can't get any free traffic because it is in a highly competitive sector.

[JJMcClure]

I wouldn''t want to rely on one source for all my business regardless of what that source is, perhaps with the exception of word of mouth recommendations which is how I get most of my work and that's not going to just vanish overnight but then I don't think Google will either.

On the subject of relying on Google though I think they're a pretty safe bet and I'll explain why. The internet exists and isn't going anywhere and people will always need a way to search the internet so there will always be a need for some kind of search engine facility. Google wrote the book on the best way for a search engine to work which is why they're the world's biggest and most successful (I first started in SEO when Alta vista was the engine to rank on.... and even now competitors can't touch Google's algorithms for search quality) so two things might happen 1) Google evolve into whatever comes after text based search engines 2) Gogle vanish but their successor continues in the same vein since the Google model for figuring out what is and isn't useful and what the best indicators of those things are looks like being the best model for a good time to come.

So either Google carry on going from strength to strength in which case you'd be silly to ignore them, or they're replaced by someone using the same principles because they're logical and practical in which case again you'd be silly to ignore how Google do it. Quality will always win out and quality drives everything Google do.

As baskets go, there are worse ones to have all your eggs in.

Google has been known to take manual action when it doesn't like something your site's doing. Who knows - tomorrow they could take your site down because they don't like the exact wording of your privacy policy or suspect that you are buying/selling text links!

And when they do that it's because they think that what you're doing will impact negatively on their users experience and therefore on the quality of their product. Who can blame them for taking action, I would.

[hooperman]

So either Google carry on going from strength to strength in which case you'd be silly to ignore them, or they're replaced by someone using the same principles because they're logical and practical in which case again you'd be silly to ignore how Google do it. Quality will always win out and quality drives everything Google do.

I don't think people are worried by the possibility of Google going away. They are concerned by the fact that, for whatever reason, their Google traffic might disappear. That might be more likely to happen with some sites than with others, but it's a very real risk that shouldn't be ignored. If you're wholly reliant on Google, then you're stuffed.

I wouldn''t want to rely on one source for all my business regardless of what that source is

Right on. I think that goes for traffic sources but also revenue sources too. Spread the risk.