Knowcal Blog

My Google site index has dropped from over 40,000 to just 800 in the space of a week. The traffic to my site has dropped to a trickle and the revenue is down substantially. That is the bad news.

The good news is that Google is finally indexing the new links (as shown by the date header on the Google results) so it looks like the index should be going up again (hopefully).

I was getting worried that I had been banned for some reason - maybe the Ajax background loading of pages, but hopefully I have just been 'sandboxed' whilst the index sorted itself out.

No more messing with the site now - I am definately going to sit tight and see what happens.

This shows the real risk of relying on one major partner for your business. In my case, with Google currently bringing in the majority of the traffic, I am in trouble if they drop me from their index. I am also using Google Adsense and Google Maps, so a ban on these would also cause me great problems.

This is a high risk strategy for any business and as Google becomes even more powerful it does worry me that they may start to use that power to create the sort of Internet they want, rather than what the 'poeple' want - I am, in many senses, a competitor to them as they have their own local search product. How long before they take exception to this and kick off all their competitors?