Google slaps my niche site out of its results. You can now find me in the second hundred list of sites – although from the way the domain is listed (minus “www.”) I assume that’s some sort of historical listing, as it’s supposed to appear with “www.”

Hmm, will have to try this again sometime with 30 day challenge style approach to see if there is a way I can avoid my site being put in a box! I think their vintage electric guitar project never got the google slap.

Am I bothered about my site getting some google slaps? Yes and no.

Yes, because I’m not going to get any organic search traffic for a while now. Not that I had much to begin with, but I did get a few.

No, because as I am learning about article submission and social media. I’m learning that I can generate traffic without google. Google is seen as the be all and end all. “I must get listed in google” blah blah blah, but really, so what? Google should be seen as a chunk of traffic, but not the only source.

In fact if the recent post on SEOBook is anything to go by, google may soon become less valuable to focus your efforts on. The post claims google adjusted their algorithms in January 2009 and is now giving extra weighting to brand names to determine at least the top 10 listings on some search phrases.

Examples given demonstrated in one instance the change in results for a search for “airline tickets” now results in 4 brand name airline companies suddenly ranking in the top 10. So it may be in your best interests to get smarter and seek out new ways of generating traffic. Because these changes might ensure you never even had a chance to begin with.

Another reason why I’m not bothered – I’m very interested in this niche and keep thinking of things I can do to grow it and offer lots of useful content. Of course there’s a chance the efforts may be a waste of time.

But I like to think that by the time it gets reindexed on google, not only will it make it to the first page – hopefully to the first few positions if not the first, but that it becomes great at converting into either affiliate sales or adsense clicks.

I may do away with adsense at some point as affiliate sales are more profitable and reflect the purpose of the site. But at the moment I’m still building content, so affiliate offers wouldn’t integrate well just yet.

Anyway if there is a tecnhique that generally avoids resulting in the google slap, please let me know.