Many unfortunate online entrepreneurs saw their income slashed overnight ? and a lot of people decided that internet marketing just wasn?t for them. Who can blame them? Others picked themselves up, dusted themselves down and set about putting recovery plans in place.
Duplicate content was removed. Over optimized sites, blogs and pages were reviewed and rewritten. Linking strategies were revisited and revised.
After a while, many people began to see the signs of recovery. Their sites, sometimes completely new, sometimes rewritten, began to appear in the SERPs again and online income began to flow once more. Panda had been a major setback ? but like most setbacks, it was temporary for those with the determination and fortitude to knuckle down and get through it.
At which point Google, in its infinite wisdom, unleashed its Penguin algo update ? and much, if not most, of the work that had been done to recover from Panda, went down the tubes. Once again, affiliate earnings were slashed and webmasters and bloggers saw their hard work trashed.
As was the case with Panda, there are plenty of internet gurus who will be happy to tell you how to get over the Penguin update. As with Panda, Penguin is probably a temporary setback for those with the resolve to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and get back on the horse. As with Panda, there will probably be yet another algo update along in a few months which will, once again, hit online entrepreneurs where it hurts (in the wallet).
In case you don?t get it yet, Google doesn?t especially like affiliate marketers or online entrepreneurs in general. Like any other corporation, Google is in business to make money. If you are on page one of Google?s natural rankings for a competitive search term, one which is a money earner, you are effectively, from Google?s perspective, getting ?free? traffic. Google aren?t earning any money from you ? but you are getting the benefit of lots of site visitors from them. Visitors, who will potentially spend money on your site (instead of clicking on Google Adwords).
By all means, jump through a few hoops to please Google and get your site back on page one. If you can achieve that in the short term then it?s as good a ways as any to get your earnings back up. However, recognize that relying on traffic from Google is possibly not the smartest long term business strategy.
If you are not, in the normal course of your business activities, putting money into Google?s coffers, you and Google have, simply put, divergent interests. There?s absolutely nothing wrong with that ? not for you, not for Google. However, expecting any form of symbiotic relationship in such circumstances is naive at best ? and possibly downright foolish.
In the longer term, the lesson to be learnt from both Panda and Penguin is that over reliance on Google for site visitors and income is a recipe for disaster. Forget about working out how to please Google and adopt a strategy that gives you more independence and makes your online income more robust and reliable.
In the first instance, try to ensure that a certain percentage of your income is genuine residual income. That way, if you lose all of your traffic overnight, you will retain a certain level of income ? even with reduced visitors. Any form of subscription service is a good option for this. Electricity, telephone services, broadband, downloadable movies, any membership site ? all of these would make a good basis for a residual income element.
Secondly, reduce your reliance on Google by trying to drive traffic to your site from other sources. Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Digg ? take your pick. That may well be something that is, in the short term at least, easier said than done. Nevertheless, your business will benefit, so it will be well worth the effort in the long run.
Jim Hayward earns residual income as an independent distributor for Telecom Plus, providing customers with a method of saving money on their monthly utility bills.
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