SE Conspiracy

It IS possible to make money online, but this is a business that is deteriorating quickly.

I am not referring so much to running companies with a unique product or service but more to those that look to the Internet as a way to earn a living online -i.e. affiliate marketing.

Making money online was very likely for years up until just a few years ago. Now, there are so many people flocking to the Internet and trying their hand at affiliate marketing that this flood has begun to wash out profits of those like myself.

Deadbeat companies that take your leads and then don’t pay have become more and more prevalent and even when they do pay, they lower their payout without warning in some cases or they simply do not track all of your sales.

Case in point: tonight, I was trying to figure out why a program I was promoting and spent considerable time and money to promote last week all of a sudden stopped making money. It turns out that the affiliate consolidator no longer offers that program. They just removed it without warning and now they redirect to some other program. That is just shady. What’s worse is that I sent an email to one of my targeted lists of 25,000+ people letting them know that they could join this great (really is) program and now I look like an idiot because the link takes them somewhere else. Nice.

Making money online now takes place mostly with unscrupulous marketers lying to “newbies” about how much money they can earn online. These big-time marketers all rely on the buddy-buddy system to promote their programs and establish credibility with unsuspecting hopefuls. In the end, though, all they are selling is a $49.95-$149.95 book of lies. There may be 2-3 good tips hidden away in their package of reading materials but mostly their tips are out-of-date and ineffective or promise to take advantage of some incredible trend -such as social networking- which sounds great to the average “joe” hoping to earn a living online.

Unfortunately, in the end, these people get duped for hundreds or thousands of dollars and -in many cases- the “tools” they are sold are nothing more than SPAM utilities and email harvesters.

That’s right! One of the BIG reasons there has been such an increase in spam over the past few years is because of these so-called Internet gurus who convince “newbies” that it is ok to send an email to someone who puts their email on their website or lists their real email as the owner of their domain. However, this is still spam in most cases. I have very rarely seen when an offer sent to harvested emails was truly interesting, helpful, and relevant.

• Spammers have made email marketing very tough -to say the least.
• Scammers have made it tough to know which sales are real.
• Hackers are a constant headache in keeping a website online.

In short, it is a cut-throat market online. I know, because I’ve been making money online for nearly a decade and I single-handedly earned more than $10,000 per month from my efforts up until just 3 short years ago. Nowadays, insiders at Google and DMOZ have worked really hard to crush anyone’s website that starts to do well. I have always obeyed the “rules” of white-hat SEO when it comes to my main websites and all I was rewarded with in the end were Pagerank ZERO websites and less than 100 visitors per month –when there are still spam results in all search engines for my target niches.

Making money online can be done but it is rife with peril and becomes a full-time job to avoid the pitfalls and unethical businesses/people. I think it will be interesting to see if the influx of “newbies” looking to earn money online will overcome the fact that millions of others have failed and supported lavish lifestyles for Internet gurus simply willing to sell someone a bogus, hyped dream. Only time will tell.

Since it wouldn’t be of much use for me to lay out the bad without offering suggestions, here’s a few of the things that make the big boys (self-proclaimed Internet gurus) their money:

• They spend thousands of dollars attending conferences to network.
• They build big-hype programs offering high commissions.
• They have money from people they dupe to spend on making allies.

So, those looking to make money online should have good social skills, like to party, have some money to throw away at first, and have something unique to bring to the table. Otherwise, those people will probably end up making only a few hundred dollars per month in income. The latter path is the one most people end up taking.

Note to newbies: If you are a newbie looking to make money online, you should be aware that most “free” and “helpful” articles (like this one) tend to only offer helpful tips on getting started if they are being paid to promote a program. That is biased marketing and is very common in the online world.

The ideas you are about to read are not affiliate links and are not paid advertisements or paid text links. This is truly valuable and insightful information on how I continue to make a living online in this volatile marketplace.

Many of the links I provide below can easily be made affiliate links so that I make money when you click or buy, but then those so-called “gurus” would call me out to be no better than them. So, to avoid being grouped with them, I forgo the opportunity to earn referrals but some examples are my own companies (noted beside, in each case).

So, to avoid this post being nothing more than a “venting topic”, I will end on some ways that many people (myself included) still manage to eek out a living online:

OPTION 1: Build your own website(s)

1. Learn a little bit of HTML skill and be able to build a website
   1. HTML: http://www.w3schools.com/html/default.asp
   2. CSS: http://www.w3schools.com/css/
      
2. Buy a web design software program (such as Dreamweaver)
   1. http://www.adobe.com/products/dreamweaver/
      
3. Save money by getting a cheap or free template to start out
   1. http://www.freewebsitetemplates.com
   2. http://www.templatemonster.com
4. Find a reputable, quality web hosting company
   1. http://www.imagion.com ($6.95/month paid annually)
      *I can only feel comfortable recommending my own company here

OPTION 2: Avoid headaches of web design and hosting by using a blog

1. I use wordpress and have been very impressed so far.
   1. http://www.wordpress.com
   2. Free signup or download to host your own blog (like I do)
      *Benefit of hosting your own blog is building traffic to your site
      

NEXT STEPS: Promote Something and/or Build Traffic

1. Sign up for a wide variety of affiliate programs (better variety)
   1. For example: http://www.cj.com (commission junction)
   2. Listing of more affiliate network programs (one of my sites)
      *uses affiliate links but there aren’t any better listings
2. Target your market. Use free services to pick profitable niches
   1. Free keyword search tool: http://inventory.overture.com
      *gives idea of terms searched in a month (i.e. potential buyers)
   2. There are other tools available too. Some free; some not. Search.
3. Fill your websites/blog with unique, valuable, and helpful content.
4. Continue to add to and update your site/blog as often as possible
   *fresh, new content attracts new visitors and builds audience

Pick niche markets that you are familiar with or that you are interested in learning about. If you simply throw up a site with links, you will earn about $2 per month (with Google ads or promoting programs). It’s not worth it. Instead, try to become a trusted expert on something and you will make quite a bit more!

As a last minute note, I should acknowledge that there is quite a large audience of people looking to make money online who do not want a website at all. It can be done, but it won’t yield a tremendous income. However, it can earn a decent side income.

For instance, several members of my “Get Paid Hwy Forum” earn several hundreds per month from completing surveys online and playing games. Here’s a link to some of the programs that members have reported as high quality and -more importantly- paying: GPT Programs that PAY.

And finally, here’s a list of revenue-sharing forums (mine is included) that will help you earn commissions on clicks from Google Adsense ads or Yahoo Publisher ads just for making helpful posts and participating. This is a good way to earn a little bit for being helpful and not have to bother with a website at all.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this post and I hope that I have helped steer you away from the fraudsters and more into the right direction for success!

Best regards,

Brandon

I don’t know if it was due to a system update or if it was hacking (i.e. my typical conspiracy), but my baby, ShrinkTheWeb, stopped generating thumbnails for about 7 hours over this weekend. I was staying up all night to prepare a proposal for review later on tonight, but I ended up working on ShrinkTheWeb until 6:30am.

I’m just glad to have fixed it. I was at my wit’s end and beginning to think I couldn’t get it, because I absolutely have to get this proposal done. But, at the last minute –shortly after Leah got up and left for work, I got it.

Getting these captured screenshots of websites to happen automatically truly is a piece of magic. It is a work of art, indeed. I was going to be upset if I didn’t get it working again, because people would be forced to switch to a lesser service, if mine wouldn’t work.

My ShrinkTheWeb Thumbnail Generator

Anyway, I have to get to my proposal and just wanted to post a quick update. Here’s a copy of the email I sent out to the faithful webmasters that currently use ShrinkTheWeb:

“On Saturday, Jan 19th (evening) until Sunday, Jan 20th (6:30am),
ShrinkTheWeb experienced an unexpected outage.

I have been up all night working on it, and although I am still
unsure as to the cause of the outage, I have gotten the system
back online and generating thumbnails once again.

All of your requests for thumbnails during the outage were still
queued, and there are about 750 thumbnails in currently in the
queue -as of this writing. They should all be cleared within an
hour or two.

I wish I could say for certain that I knew what caused this
outage and that it won’t happen again, but it seems that the
server “conveniently” updated a critical piece of system
software that exhibited different behavior after the update.

Generating these thumbnails is nothing short of magic, and even
simple updates can cause horrific problems.

In any case, I will keep an eye on things and hope this did not
cause any great inconvenience for you.

Best regards,

Brandon
-ShrinkTheWeb”

Today, I wanted to talk about how all webmasters are told they should not sell advertisements on their websites unless it is done the way Google wants it done. You know, I watched for years as other webmasters profited while I sat back and ‘did the right thing’ by not selling links. In hindsight, my sites in that market could’ve easily generated more than $7,500 per month in additional revenue. I had three sites at PR7 (naturally!), a couple of PR5’s and PR6’s, and several dozen PR4’s and below.

Over the two to three years that I refused to succumb to the pressure, selling text links would’ve netted me at least $225,000 in EXTRA income. Man. Now that I’ve actually sat down and done the math, I’m really disheartened.

So anyway, doing what Google told everyone was ‘the right thing to do’ cost me well over a quarter of a million dollars! But wait, wait! There is an upside and a benefit to doing the right thing, right? I -like a million others- believed that we would be rewarded for our good deeds in ‘trying to make the Internet a better place’ with traffic and visitors. Thus, we would be able to grow our businesses ‘the right way.’

“At the end of the day we are likely to be punished for our kindnesses.” - Ronin (1998)

So, how are my sites doing now-a-days? Hmm. Well, I have had ZERO traffic from Google for over a year and although I should have started looking out for MY best interests back then, I decided to wait it out and give them the benefit of the doubt. So, as of today, my portfolio of sites is still getting roughly …umm… ZERO traffic from Google and their value for selling links has diminished to the point of possibly generating $1,000 per month -if I’m lucky. And, even then, that could end at any moment when Google blindly wipes out another million websites from its ranking index, just for fun.

I’m sure many people who still have some Google traffic (by no doing of their own despite their beliefs) will swear by Google’s generosity -if you stay the course. I’m sure they would say that I must not know anything about marketing online or I must’ve employed some kinds of “black hat” techniques. Sadly, no, I never employed any tricks and I do know how to market online. I’ve made quite a bit of money marketing online for myself and others.

Ah well. Most people were born and raised to look out for themselves, but I guess I missed that day in class. For me, the moral of the story is that I must -to survive- start to look out for myself and myself alone. If I can better someone else or another business in the process, then great. If not, too bad. I am on the right path now, but is it too late?

From time to time, I test various methods of driving traffic to my site as a jump start.

In this case, I wanted to promote my forum, “Get Paid Hwy” (visit site) to the GPT or “Get Paid To…” community. Since Bux.to has an 887 alexa rank and touts incredible traffic related to “Paid to Click” traffic, I figured this would be very relevant traffic.

So, as always, I began by doing some research online. Despite a few posts in forums that bux.to didn’t pay them, there was little feedback. In most cases, they eventually reported being paid. However, from the advertising side, there was little to nothing to be found. I would be basically shooting in the dark on this one.

Although, I never advertise anything without setting up tracking and testing in various ways to make sure my purchase was worthwhile. That way, I know whether or not to use them again. In this case, I was using AWStats to verify the hits and referrer. I had two webmaster friends outside of the United States to help me verify that my ad was showing to members inside their system.

I bought two packages to test:

• 10,000 premium members (members who upgraded) at $179 and
• 2,500 regular members at $46.75

Here’s the screenshot of payment from my paypal account:

I started the 10,000 premium member campaign on the 28th, and that seemed to go fairly well. The visitors were coming in and showed in AWStats and in my forum stats. However, not one single sign-up out of 1,300+ visitors does seem odd. We had four(4) sign-ups, but the one I asked said she found us through “Free Ad Planet.” Since we have a very high conversion rate on sign-ups, I was a little suspicious but figured I would give the benefit of the doubt.

I figured not all of their members would read English but maybe I could get a boost by buying the 2,500 regular member option. So, I did that.

At first, I was shocked that my server began to crash shortly after my ad was approved. “Ok,” I thought, “they definitely do send some massive traffic …and quickly.” So, I quickly moved to shut down unnecessary services and sites on that server to dedicate more resources to the forum. That seemed to help, but the site was still slow because Apache was showing 250 simultaneous requests and more coming in constantly.

At any rate, once I got things under control, I asked my webmaster friend in Hungary to go ahead and log in to bux.to and go to “Surf Ads” to see if my ad was showing for him. As always, I asked him to make sure he cleared his cookies, cleared his cache, and opened a new browser. I nearly flipped when he told me the bux.to site wouldn’t come up for him. And, I nearly flipped again when he said another tab opened with “http://www.get-paid-hwy.com” in it. What’s odd about that was that I never told this webmaster friend which of my sites I was promoting. He sent me the following screenshot:

It’s kind of tough to see in that view, so here’s a zoomed in shot:

Whenever I went to the site, I would get the site without any popup. I asked my other webmaster friend in Peru to visit the site and he did not see any popup but said the site was VERY slow.

The bux.to site was very fast for me. So, it would seem that we were hitting two different servers, perhaps. That is just speculation but it would explain why foreigners were getting timeouts or extreme delays in loading while I could load the site instantly.

It would make sense then that they were driving massive amounts of traffic to their site to boost their Alexa and traffic ranking and then opening up pop-ups for certain foreign (probably Eastern Bloc and Asian) countries who could not even know what they were looking at anyway. That way, bux.to got the credit for the traffic while we got visitors in our log but whom we could never convert. Nice.

So, you can bet I will be demanding a refund immediately. Why?

Well, here’s what is going on:

1. Whenever you make a purchase for regular members, they purchase a ton of foreign traffic ultra-cheap
2. They pour that traffic into their site (hoping some will join) to boost their traffic stats
3. They redirect a pop-up that opens up the purchaser’s site
4. Since the poor sap who bought the traffic is most likely in a country not seeing the pop-up, they would never be the wiser and they will see all the hits and simply wonder why no one joined or signed up

So, my advice is to stay away from Bux.to for buying traffic. In fact, this is most likely the type of scam being run by most of the “buy traffic” websites. So, the moral is definitely: “Buyer Beware!”

I knew a guy who bought a “go-phone” and some people use those phones to talk to creditors because they can be thrown away as needed. So, anyway, this guy used to get all kinds of bill collector’s calling him for information regarding past due invoices.Now, let me ask you. If you have someone else call any creditor who holds your personal information, how difficult is it to get information out of them? How much proof do you need before they discuss your details? Yeah, it takes a lot. It takes a full name, a social security number, an account number, and more.

Now, this blew my mind too. This guy was so sick of getting these calls that he decided to toy with a couple of the creditors before getting a new number. All in all, out of three different creditors, he was able to get the person’s full name, social security number, telephone account number, previous home telephone number, gas bill account number, home address, previous address, date of birth, county of birth, and a few other details. You wouldn’t believe. Those pieces of information he obtained without proving who he was and by simply ASKING for the information.

Now, if you’ve ever been late on a bill… you can rest assured that your personal information could end up in the hands of just about anyone.

So, yeah… you gotta love the system.

Today, just like every month, I got an email from one of my vendors for dedicated server service. The reason that irks me is that I cancelled my services with this vendor on the 8th of this month (two weeks ago).

You see, I have had enough experience in my life to know that companies seem to ignore cancellations and ALMOST ALWAYS keep on billing me (don’t get me started about Globat.com Web Hosting!!). In this case, I called to confirm my cancellation and get a confirmation number (imperative that you always get a confirmation number!). However, I was told that there were no confirmation numbers and that the billing would cease and the account was cancelled. Although that was not good enough for me, they insisted there was no way to track cancellations.

Odd. Very odd.

At any rate, I decided to immediately log in and put a fake credit card on file -just in case. As it turns out, it was a good move on my part. Today’s email was stating that the billing failed and they want me to pay the amount due immediately.

Yeah, right.

I called up there and was told that *I* made the mistake of cancelling my extra services and did not cancel my servers themselves. “Hmm”, I thought. Istdontthinkso.

Let’s suppose that somehow I “thought” I checked off the box to cancel the services AND missed the one for the server itself and it was my mistake. Why then did the invoice today have the FULL balance including the extra services? I thought those were cancelled? Hmm.

I have -once again- gone through the trouble of cancelling, but I was told -once again- that there are no confirmation numbers and no way for me to prove that I cancelled. The only consolation I got was that the person helping me said that he would make notes of all I had explained to him about my situation. I hope that’s enough.

At least they cannot bill my credit card anymore.

This is not the first time and has happened on many occasions with many companies (I’ve done business with a lot of places). They always claim that it is either my fault or “they didn’t know.” Is it truly ignorance or is it subterfuge? I truly feel “defrauded” every time this happens.

I am beginning to believe that this is how big business is done.

*Things change quickly, so for relevance, please note the date of this article.

I’ve been noticing around the Internet lately that top rankings only seem to pay off for extremely popular phrases such as “Credit Cards” and “Health Insurance.” I guess those phrases will be popular even within a small search engine. But, what about phrases like “Platinum Credit Cards” and “Health Insurance Quotes?” Do they actually generate worthwhile traffic?

Let’s take a look, shall we?

I was going to break this down by each of the three major search engines, but they all seem to have basically the same result. So, I’ll summarize them as a whole and pick out the slight differences. I’m searching for “Platinum Credit Cards” and I’m only counting what’s on the front page. It is not easy to rank well for this phrase, so you have to know you will be spending some money to get there.

Now, I’m seeing that there are mostly actual credit card companies as the bulk of the results -which is expected. All three major search engines have done a good job of weeding out the affiliate-only or ads-heavy sites and replaced them with actual, legitimate results (i.e. the companies themselves and only a couple of high-end referral directories).

The actual companies have high traffic -which is also expected, but there are a couple of sites in the results (across all three engines) that have little to no traffic at all. In fact, in MSN, the number #1 result (as of this posting) has absolutely no Alexa rank and probably fewer than 10 actual visitors per month!

One of the sites with very little traffic is in the top #10 across all three major search engines, and yet it has so little traffic. If that particular site earns enough in credit card referrals to cover the cost of its SEO campaign, I would be very surprised.

The remainder of the sites all have very high traffic -which we can now deduce did not come from the SE’s- and heavy advertising is the reason for their success.

So, is it better to spend your marketing dollars on SEO or on direct advertising?

Now, let’s check out the next phrase. I am now searching for “Health Insurance Quotes” and here’s what I found:

We have basically the same mixture as before with a good concentration of the actual insurance companies and only a small portion of directory or review sites. This is a major improvement over the results from 2005 and 2006.

On a side note: During 2005 and 2006, I was beginning to think there was a conspiracy whereby Google was sending traffic to only sites that couldn’t possibly make any money. But, since their results have improved drastically, I suppose I’ll put that conspiracy theory on the back-burner.

So, back to the results, I see the same thing as before. We have several sites that have high traffic but they are the actual companies who receive quite a bit of type-in traffic and they have high budget marketing campaigns. However, there are even more sites in these results -across all the major search engines- that are review sites, and all of them have pitiful traffic. Most of them are found in the top 10 across all three search engines, but they are either “decent traffic” or so little traffic it doesn’t matter. Since there is a site with no traffic at all but is at the top of two search engine results, I can only feel that the “decent traffic” sites must have more advertising besides just search engine optimization.

At any rate, I feel that we can conclude from these findings that the search engines do not really send that much traffic -even for quality terms- if you are not ranking for the most generic and high traffic terms. It’s either that or the sites with little to no traffic are being overlooked by searchers in lieu of more “recognizable” names.

Could it be that searchers have matured to the point that they are better judges of relevance on their own? Could it be that marketing and brand awareness is having an effect on which links a user clicks when they are searching?

You tell me.

I was just searching through my statistics logs on several of my sites tonight, and I discovered something interesting. I noticed that my traffic hasn’t gone down on any of my sites over the past year. In fact, traffic has mostly increased while my Alexa ranks have tanked. Why does that surprise me? It surprises me because my income has tanked along with my Alexa rank and I assumed that my traffic must’ve died. So, what happened?

I have been so busy and involved with developing “Shrink The Web”, “LinkSmile”, and “jAvVy” that I haven’t even bothered keeping up with my traffic versus conversions versus income. Now that I’m done with those projects and analyzing things again, it seems to me that I’m getting as much -if not more- traffic than last year but the conversions are down. Could it be that my newer content is so poor that it no longer converts? Or, is it more likely that the quality of traffic has gone downhill?

To answer that question, I’ve asked for feedback from several fellow webmasters and really pushed them to take a quick look at their stats versus their income. Can you guess what we found? They have several top rankings for some key phrases and those yield less traffic than before (in some cases the same) , yet their income has been declining for years.

Has the struggle for “high rankings” become a quest for fool’s gold?

This income depression seems to affect sales as well as clicks on advertisements (such as Google Ads, Yahoo! Ads, etc). In general, everyone reported the same click-through on advertisements but only 1/3 of the income year over year. It would seem that it is not our content that is failing us; it is the search engines.

Could it actually be possible that the quality (and possibly the amount) of traffic coming through Google, Yahoo, and MSN is really quite a bit less than last year or the year before?

I did notice a direct correlation between my recent increase in advertising and a noticeable increase in conversions. So, I know my direct advertising is working. How then is it that my other traffic seems so worthless?

How’s this for a conspiracy theory: “What if the major search engines are no longer moving the traffic they once were and they are filling the gap with massive parked traffic or bought visitors?”

Would that then explain this low quality of traffic that still floods some of my sites?

Would that explain why I’m seeing conversions as low as when I used to bid for placement in excite, goclick, and looksmart?

Would that help to explain why Google is distracting us all with this PageRank versus traffic versus text links mumbo-jumbo? I’m sure any truth to a massive drop in traffic wouldn’t help their over-inflated stock price …or their ego for that matter.

The site statistics shown below were taken from one of our sites that employed no SEO “techniques” except for on-page optimization (not too much though). We advertised in related spaces to drive traffic and the site also did well from more than 5,000 natural backlinks.

First, let’s paint the picture of the traffic and revenue losses:

1. In 2005, I saw a HUGE dip in traffic across all of my sites. There were no bans and no other reasons to explain the loss in traffic. This site held Top 1 to Top 5 rankings for years.



2. The Google traffic dropped by 79.3% and conversions dropped by 31.8%. The Google traffic did pick back up at one point and surpassed Jan figures but it tanked by November 2005 -appearing to be a complete “de-listing.”

Stats for Jan 2005	Stats for Feb 2005

3. Yahoo and MSN continued to send quality traffic throughout most of the year but when that traffic dropped off in Nov and Dec, I saw a 47.4% decline in overall traffic from the January drop and another 68% decline in revenue! Google traffic nearly ceased altogether and represented 17.8% of the overall traffic lost from Feb to Dec.

Stats for Nov 2005	Stats for Dec 2005

From that period on, a search in the specific niche this website served would return nothing but absolutely spammy, affiliate, or made-for-adsense sites. The results were absolutely useless in this niche until earlier this year!

In mid-2007, this site was re-listed and regained its former top 5 ranking in this niche area. So, how many visitors do you think we get from Google, Yahoo, and MSN?

Let’s take a look at our visitors so far in December (13 full days), shall we?

Now that is a pathetic amount of traffic for having such high rankings. If that weren’t bad enough, the “doubled” traffic (yes, 100% increase from October 2007) has prompted our income to increase only marginally (something like 5%) as a result of our newly re-acquired high rankings for key terms.

So, after reviewing all of this data, two thoughts stand out in my mind:

1. “high rankings” generate a small fraction of pre-2005 rankings, and
2. boosts in visitors are comprised of 95% worthless traffic

This is precisely why I haven’t cared much about PageRank, Rankings, or SEO over the past couple of years. I no longer see the point. Perhaps certain industries still prosper and profit from this traffic but not mine -and my companies serve a wide range of niche markets.

Anyone else feel like search engine optimization isn’t worth the investment in time and money anymore?

The only things that seem to work for me are buying quality advertising on related websites willing to place banners or links in premium locations -whether they be direct links, nofollow, or javascript. Sponsored email campaigns can also be effective and we see some “light” benefit to pay-per-click campaigns in certain niches.

Perhaps link buying and selling has gotten so much attention lately because it is actually hurting search engines more in the pocket than anything. Perhaps visitors are finding sites through links, banners, and social bookmarking sites instead of by searching.

To help shed some light on the 2005 drop -which a couple of my webmaster friends also identified as a critical point, I decided to do some more research. The most relevant articles that might hint to the root of the problem and related closely to today’s issues are:

1. Google “Backlink Update” (Jan 1, 2005)
   http://www.prweaver.com/blog/2005/01/02/81-google-dance-alert
2. Google, Yahoo, and MSN Unite on NoFollow (Jan 18, 2005)
   http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/050118-204728

Anyone else find that interesting?

Would it be safe to assume that this depression of traffic many of us see today has anything at all to do with the big push for rel=nofollow?

All I know is that if my conspiracy theory is true, then Google is doing a fantastic job at distracting webmasters (and therefore investors) from the truth. It also makes me wonder, “Who will have the power position in five (5) years, if all the traffic is dispersing again?”