Source Of Traffic: Social Media Or Google ?

I still put my focus for the full 100% on Google, some people might find that silly or stupid but they see Google as en evil machine who is out there to destroy everything they can, while that's definitely not the case.

When dealing with Google there are some rules you need to obey and sometimes the rules are a bit tighter then you would expect. However after sufficient experience you can almost put your clock on it.

Google is for a large degree predictable, they created that by all their updates in the last years, if you followed it closely you should know what you can do and what you can not do.

- Site quality plays a much larger role then before
- Automated back links get you busted faster then ever
- Over monetizing gets punished
- Even blog network links can get you hurt when you don't know what you're doing
- Anchor diversity plays a larger role then ever (just repeating the money keywords in variations won't help you anymore, you need more then that)
- Spun content for link building is out of the question (or if not then soon enough)
- Mass tiered spam pyramids won't work anymore (and even if they do it's probably on Google's to do list).

Once you know these type of things or have reason to suspect that certain things may become a problem in the near future you just refrain yourself from that and it becomes a much more reliable source of traffic as you can adjust your campaigns to it.

If I were a noob with zero experience I would probably be terrified of Google same like many and call it an unreliable source of traffic, and I might chose for other sources of traffic like social media and paid traffic perhaps.

But as said, when you know what Google wants and you give them what they want then there's nothing to fear of.

Google always penalized sites for a combination of things, it hardly ever happens that a site gets penalized solely based on one thing in the list that doesn't add up so they do give us some space to experiment, if you decide to play on the edge of the cliff it's your own fault though.

Even when you get penalized it's not the end of the world, there are always ways to recover and move on, agreed recovery is a long term process but it is possible.

The main benefit of Google traffic are:

- it's consistent traffic
- eventually it's free traffic, insane ROI's to be made
- it's relatively easy to scale up in an unlimited way

Disadvantages are:

- you need to be darn sure what you're doing
- the entry costs are quite high
- it can be very time consuming

However social media is also very time consuming and once you stop participating or coming up with new things it die's off real quickly, same like forum marketing, I was a bit idle for the last couple of weeks and the forum traffic stream almost died up.

Websites that depend on Google traffic and that used a solid link building strategy can rank for years to come without you having to lift a finger or spend a cent on it, that's what makes it so lucrative.

Everyone made mistakes with Google, me too, but we should learn from it instead of throwing the towel in the ring.