Fly on the E-Commerce Cyberwall

The problem with eggs and baskets
Well, time to own up to another mistake. I got complacent. I relied way too much on organic search engine traffic and procrastinated on developing traffic from sources other than free search engine searches.

Not a good idea. I came back to my site after a couple of days of having been knocked offline by a power outage only to find that my traffic from Google has crashed. Keywords that rested comfortably in the top ten on Google for months and that gave me the bulk of my traffic are now nowhere to be found on Google. Fortunately, my clients' sites are holding steady, but mine are in the toilet.

Which goes to show that it is simply not feasible to rely on free search engine traffic alone anymore. The search engine landscape has changed greatly.

Algorithm changes are getting harder to reverse engineer and are changing so drastically when they do change that the resulting position shifts are dramatic. My traffic, driven mainly by free search engine results, had grown steadily at a rate of 20–25% per month over the past three months. Now in one algo change, they're back to where they were in May.

Granted, this may be only a fluctuation as the Google datacenters readjust for the latest major update this week. But it's not safe to rely entirely on free search engine traffic like I used to be able to do a couple of years ago.

It's important to diversify your traffic sources (as I should have done) so that the free search engine traffic becomes a pleasant bonus instead of your sole means of support.

I had started diversifying my traffic in the past few weeks, but not enough to cover this setback. Well, back to the drawing board for a little more diversification.
Jeff