Ask HN: Would your startup die if your Google traffic disappeared?

8 points·AznHisoka··4 comments

Imagine your Google traffic disappeared overnight, due to a penalty that you can never get lifted.

Would your startup/side-business die?

Instead of worring about Google and other search engines due to penalties etc, you should be focusing on building up what I call defensible traffic base.

For example, as well as effective SEO you should be focusing on things such as:

- Advertising & Partnerships With Sites In Your Niche

- Off-line Marketing (inc. word of mouth & traditional ads)

- Bloggers & Other Webmasters Within AND Outside Your Niche

- Online Communities e.g. Relevant Forums etc

- Social Media Channels - Twitter, YouTube etc

- Newsletter Subscribers

- Effective Site Branding

However if you have been penalized they can be lifted and in some cases you can exploit some of the workarounds on such penalties to get your original positions back with the current domain (or a new one if necessary).

This happened to me, when Google expanded their list of products and services that can't be advertised on AdWords last summer. Google accounted for 40% of new customers on one of my ecommerce sites and that disappeared overnight. It took half a year to build up and optimize other advertising channels, but now the site does fine in a world without Google.

Yes. So it goes -- that's why they are side businesses. Another thought: sometimes dependency on Google is a good thing.

nope

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