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

[Clinton]

I've mentioned earlier in the thread that sites in Flippa seem to get disproportionately more traffic from Google. People buying their first site or spending less than $1000 seem to think that this is a good thing because the traffic is "free", but the opposite is the case - it's actually a bad thing.

The average site out there gets a lot smaller percentage of traffic from Google. Getting more than 50% of traffic from Google is not normal. An over 50% figure suggests the site is over-reliant on Google and however they've achieved their results, it may not be long lasting. As Google discovers that the site isn't really being recommended by others - and they will find out - there's a high chance they'll re-evaluate the importance they've accorded the site.

I appreciate that some SEOs would disagree with this, and Flippa certainly would - they don't want the world believing the sites for sale in their marketplace are not "normal".

But those sites aren't. In the early days, the quickest way a site can get traffic is via SEO. In the long run, a site has got to build a more diversified referrer base. It happens in the natural course of a site's development. Remember, Google controls only 5% of the way people reach their destination - bookmarks, Facebook, Wikipedia etc account for a lot more. Facebook on its own is responsible for more people reaching major portals than Google is! But if Google accounts for just 5% of how people reach their destination and your site is getting 60, 70, 80% of traffic from Google, you've been doing too much SEO and not enough building of a diversified referrer base.

Just saw this Hitwise report which has figures of what fraction of visitors to large sites in different sectors are sent by Google. Those figures seem to match my own experience discussed earlier of 20-40% of traffic to my sites coming from Google. Those are the kind of figures most large, established sites seem to have.

[Rover]

Clinton,

You say that people should not rely on Google for more than 50% of their traffic. What do you think would be an ideal mix for people to rely on? For example, would it be 30% google and 30% facebook and 10% other search engines and the other 30% (where would that come from)? Would you throw ppc into the mix.

[Clinton]

There is no fixed percentage, Rover. It's varies based on industry, country, type of visitor, type of site etc. I know a site that provides a service for residents of a particular local authority and processes payments from those residents. It gets 90% of its traffic from that local authority's site and almost none from Google. There's a open source dev site I know that gets over 80% of its traffic from a single large Linux project site. Heck, these forums get over 90% of new visitors from my own experienced-people.co.uk site.

In the first example above, that site's traffic source is pretty secure. They have a contract with the local authority and they don't need to bother appeasing search engines. The dev site doesn't have a written agreement but a symbiosis exists which secures their traffic. These forums are assured of new traffic from my other site as long as I own that site. As an owner I need to concern myself not so much with the source of traffic to this site but sources to the feeder site that this one relies on.

As you can see, there are a lot of models. One is the fairly new site relying on the easy pickings that come from some basic SEO.