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Ever since Google went public, it’s been getting tougher to get free traffic from Google. They make nearly constant algo changes, and the discount almost all backlinks which are counted by other search engines. In some ways, Google spends so much time analyzing links, that the idea of just creating natural pages for rankings seems almost unlikely. Their very efforts to curb spam are likely to inflame the problem even more.

What I’ve been doing in response to many of Google’s recent algo changes has been to ignore them as much as possible. I will not make a decision based on “what Google will think” of my website, because frankly, I think Google is out of touch.

Like a billionaire you may have know when they were poor, Google no longer needs anyone. They have a huge market cap and a high flying stock to prop up their earnings machine, so it’s not likely they’ll be changing how they do business any time soon. If you get traffic, feel lucky, because it’s not a right, but a privilege.

Social networking websites are currently bringing in a ton of qualified traffic and that trend is likely to continue. You can find live bodies easily operating through the social network sites, who can be marketed to subtly and effectively. This traffic is very direct, and gives you a chance to convert them to your website for low or no cost.

Sure, Google is still the main referrer on most of my sites, but I’m looking forward to a day when there’s plenty of sources providing traffic to me. The whole world is still a bit Google-centric, but I see that dwindling every day.

Normally, I won’t so a repetitive site: command, because I know just how addictive it can be. If you type site: in you’ll get a different value from one minute to the next. I’m familiar with the concept of Google Data Centers and the like, but really, it’s remarkable just how much shifting goes on routinely in Google. What’s even more amazing to me is just how much they crawl, in order to show such small index counts for certain websites.

In particular, it looks like Vbulletin and other forum software were cleaned up a bit in the index, as well as any site deemed “duplicate content”. All in all, these new rules really have resulted in a much different looking index in the last few days. But I’m convinced to just wait it out, because none of the data centers appear to be in sync, and I’m sure even more violent changes are coming in the next few weeks. Google didn’t get famous by being exclusive. They were always known for being inclusive, so I’m betting their new way of crawling is most related to bandwith costs versus revenue.

I really think Google might have lost it this time. The mantra of building great content and allowing Google to find it also appears to be losing its’ appeal quickly. Time will tell, but if the current state of affairs worsens, it’s likely customers might eventually wise up and switch to other search engines. Ask.com is advertising, so you know they must be serious about at least taking some market share from Google.

Google is big on quality these days. In fact, that’s all they talk about. At long last, Google mouthpiece Matt Cutts has released the fact that Google has made serious changes to their PageRank system, which are severely impacting the number of indexed pages people have in Google. Google has instituted some sort of system which now determines which backlinks are “quality’ and which ones aren’t. To me this represents a dangerous mis-step in Google’s policies.

Google should have some sort of impartiality in order to appear fair to the public. It seems with these latest updates to their ranking algo, they get to decide solely what’s considered quality and if a site is not ‘worthy’, it won’t even be included in the results! Google has lost all sense of comprehensiveness, and just conceded the search engine wars to other parties if this is actually their attitude.

Well for most, making “quality pages” ought to be enough. Since there’s no other guidance from Google except for specific propraganda, I plan on taking an impartial viewpoint until all of the changes play themselves out.

Google, who is on a rampage announcing new “products”, has announced you can use their Traffic Estimator tool now, whether you have a Google Adwords account or not. People with AdWords have been familiar with this tool for quite some time.

The tool gives you a rough idea of what bidding on keywords does, and it gives you an overall idea of the type of competition you might face on a keyword. If you couple your research with Google Trends, it can give you some idea of the volume and the direction of a search term.

The tools can’t hurt, but they’re really nothing new or that exciting. It’s getting typical for Google to launch these thin web apps, and to sit back and see what comes of them. I’d love to see how well Google would do if they actually had to charge money for a product. In any event, the uses of these tools is free, so they’re well worth the money.

Google has a lot of trouble keeping pages in their index these days, and the best part is, it doesn’t appear to be getting any better. We’ve all heard webmasters complain in the past about drops in rankings and the like, but this time the complaints are even more specific. Google is dropping legitimate pages all the time

Big Daddy is though to be the culprit, and it well could be. Apparently Google has rolled out a new infrastructure which changes how Google crawls and indexes pages. One of the main goals of the update was to fix problems they had with indexing duplicate content and to clean up the supplemental index which has been showing erroneous data for years. So far the indexing and SERPs are even choppier than ever.

I’ve seen severe indexing problems since 9/22/2005 when Big Daddy was first mentioned as an un-named update, and the problem is still not solved all these months later. The fact is, I can see the page counts changing again today, so I’ll assume they’re working on it and are close to a resolution. The alternative thought is not worth having.