Google Doesn't Owe You Traffic

Every time Google rolls out an algorithm update, Twitter explodes with rage, and the chorus of voices crying "Google killed my site!" and "This update destroyed small businesses!" and "Google only cares about ads now!" reaches such a crescendo that you'd think the company had personally visited each website and set it on fire.

And my favorite refrain, the one that gets repeated with the confidence of someone who has never considered they might be wrong: "Google is broken."

No, your business model was broken.

The Entitlement Problem

Somewhere along the way, website owners decided they were entitled to Google traffic, as if it were a constitutional right enshrined in the First Amendment, when in fact it's not, because Google is a private company with a product called search results, and they're trying to make that product useful for searchers, and that's their job, not sending traffic to your affiliate site that exists primarily to monetize people who were looking for actual information.

If your rankings dropped, it's because Google decided something else serves searchers better (and before panicking, you should at least diagnose the actual cause), which is not Google being evil but rather Google being Google, doing the thing they've always done, which is adjusting their algorithm to serve their users.

You Built on Rented Land

Here's the uncomfortable truth that nobody wants to hear: if your business depends on Google traffic, you don't have a business, you have a dependency, and dependencies are fragile things that break when the entity you depend on decides to change direction.

Google can change the rules anytime they want, and they've done it before, and they'll do it again, and every "update" is a reminder that you're playing in someone else's sandbox according to rules they can modify without asking your permission. (Yet somehow SEO keeps not dying, which tells you something about how adaptable the industry is.)

Complaining about algorithm updates is like complaining about rent increases when you chose to build on rented land and accepted the risk that comes with not owning the ground beneath your feet.

The Updates Aren't Random

Most sites that get hit by algorithm updates were doing something sketchy, not always intentionally but sketchy nonetheless - thin content disguised with word count, affiliate spam dressed up as "reviews," programmatic pages that exist only to capture long-tail traffic without providing any actual value to the people who land on them.

When these sites get hit, they cry foul and claim persecution, but Google isn't punishing good sites so much as finally catching the bad ones, which is a distinction that matters if you're being honest about what your site actually provides to the world.

What Surviving Sites Have in Common

Sites that survive algorithm updates share a few traits, and understanding these traits is more useful than complaining about Google on social media:

They'd exist without Google, because they're real businesses with real customers who would find them anyway through word of mouth or direct visits or any of the other channels that existed before search engines.

Their content has inherent value, meaning people bookmark it and share it and come back to it, not because Google told them to but because it's actually useful.

They have brand searches, meaning people type their name into Google directly, which is a signal that you've built something worth seeking out.

They don't play games, meaning no tricks and no "optimization" in the pejorative sense, just useful stuff created for humans rather than algorithms.

The Real Security

The only protection against Google volatility is not needing Google, which sounds obvious when you say it out loud but seems to escape most people who build their entire business on organic traffic.

Build an email list, create repeat customers, develop brand awareness, make something people tell their friends about - these are the things that protect you when Google decides your rankings should be different tomorrow.

SEO should be a supplement rather than a foundation, and if your entire business collapses because Google changed an algorithm, you never had a business in the first place, you had an arbitrage scheme that worked until it didn't.

Google doesn't owe you traffic. Nobody does. Build something that earns it.