A Business With One Vendor – Googles ‘Farmer’ Update

The past month has been filled with companies scrambling to find a solution to Googles Farmer Update, find a new business model or find a bridge with a low guardrail.  On the evening of Feb 23 many of us went to sleep after checking stats and peacefully dosed off assuming that Thursday would be like any other day in internet life.  Wrong!  I awoke back in Florida and rolled over, grabbed my laptop and checked stats … and there it was, complete devastation.  One of our sites, StarReviews lost approximately 50% of our traffic overnight, caught up in Googles Farmer update … aimed at eliminating low quality sites or content farms.  I am not even going to go into the issues and complaints associated with the update but suffice to say … many felt they were collateral damage in these sweeping changes.  12% of all searches were effected by this change and now one month later, the hopes of “coming back” have faded and the realization of lower traffic and lower revenue is sinking in and layoffs have increased and websites are closing.

All this leads to one question, who is stupid enough to build a business that relies almost completely on one vendor.  Would you build a house out of wood if there was only one (fickle) place that sold wood?  Would you buy a Chevy if there was only one place to get tires and that place could at any given moment decide not to sell you tires … and not tell you why?  That is what people were doing, relying almost completely on Google (yes Yahoo and Bing too) for their traffic and their revenue and sitting back with fingers crossed never thinking that this could happen.

Unfortunately I am one of those stupid entrepreneurs but the free traffic tasted so good, so sweet, what was I to do?  Hundreds, if not thousands of websites were “killed” because these savvy internet entrepreneurs could see past the free traffic to the pitfalls associated with those free clicks.

Lessons have been learned, respect for Google as a business partner (even from those who benefited) has diminished and thousands of entrepreneurs are saying never again.  Let’s check back in a year or two and see who has really learned their lesson.

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