Learn the Lesson of Eggs and Baskets.
Posted On: 2013-09-30
Earlier this month a friend of mine learned an invaluable lesson about eggs and baskets. One of his blogs that has been around for over 8 years suddenly drew the ire of Google and was manually reviewed and dumped right out of their listings ... about the same time as one of our sites got hit in the same way.
It came as something of a shock to him because this is a guy who is about as white hat as they come. I wouldn't exactly call him a Google fanboy but he certainly believes in following Google's rules and to be hit with a penalty like that about the same as suddenly having a bucket of ice water tipped over him.
Obviously he's busy looking for the reason that he no longer feels the Google love ... of course they didn't bother to tell him what it was that upset them so much ... but until he does find it, corrects it and then convinces Google that all is sweetness and light his website is dead in the water.
It's getting no traffic ... except for spammers ... and he's getting no sales. Fortunately for him that blog is not his only source of income but if it was then he would be in dire straits because without those Google listings he has no traffic and without traffic he has no income.
It's not a pleasant place to be but then he's not the only one in that situation. I've just been reading a post on a mainstream SEO blog that looks at what people are doing to overcome Panda penalties. The author has found that every business that has called him in to try and fix their Panda penalties has seen a drop in traffic of between 60 and 70 percent and that is just about killing them financially.
But what do you expect when you put the future of your business in the hands of just one traffic source? Should you have the expectation that your business websites will always be acceptable to Google?
Isn't the writing on the wall for every website owner when Google announces that every year they make over 500 changes to their algorithm? And if that isn't enough aren't the tales of woe and despair that other updates have generated enough to make any website owner wary of ever trusting Google with their future?
Two years ago many of those websites that have now been whacked by Panda were perfectly acceptable to Google but now they're not and without warning they're penalised and dumped so what's to stop the same thing happening to other people tomorrow ... next week ... or in two month's time?
Absolutely nothing.
Of course here in adult most webmasters tend not to rely so directly on the goodwill of Google. We tend to rely more on link lists and TGPs for our traffic. And while we don't put all our eggs in the one basket and focus just on one link list or one TGP we do certainly restrict ourselves to a select few that we know will send us the most traffic.
But how reliable are those listings? Do we really have any guarantee that our free sites and galleries will always be accepted by those traffic sources? Even if we pay to be listed is there any guarantee that we will always get listed ... or that they will always continue to send us traffic?
What's to stop those trusted traffic sources ... the ones that we rely on for our traffic and our income ... always being there and having traffic to send to us?
In the past I've talked about the single point of failure ... the one thing in your business that could bring your business down if something went wrong. The one choke point that could put you out of business if it stopped functioning.
For many people in mainstream that choke point is Google and here in adult it's our traffic sources. Mainstream website owners can learn a very valuable lesson from those being choked by Panda if they only have the sense to see how it could just as easily happen to them. Sadly most of them won't.
Here in adult we can learn the same lesson by watching the pain and suffering that Panda is bringing to mainstream ... if only we have the sense to see that we're not immune from the same problem. Sure, it may not be Panda here in adult but if you've got all your eggs in just one ... or even just a few ... baskets then you need to learn the Panda lesson too.
So how many baskets do you have your eggs in?