Do You Need Google to Do Well Online?

Strictly speaking, you don’t need Google to do well online. It is entirely possible to get all your traffic from elsewhere. The question really is however why you would want to get all your traffic from elsewhere. Anyway, if for whatever reason you have been de-indexed and you don’t want to try playing by Google’s rules, here are five other ways to get traffic:
Facebook
Facebook is now the second most visited site on the web. This means that effectively, buying Facebook ads and building an audience entirely based around Facebook is eminently possible. Of course you have to remember that Facebook users are often a different breed from those who will visit you from Google. They tend to be looking for relationships more than Google searchers.
You’ll also find it’s not quite as easy to get noticed on Facebook since they don’t do their search algorithms in the same way as Google does them. Instead, the search is much more highly personalized, focusing first and foremost on friends and pages the person has already visited. While Google has been going in that direction as well, it’s still easier to get general traffic there than on Facebook.
Bing/Yahoo
People get so obsessed with their Google rankings that they often forget that Bing and Yahoo together account for more than 30% of all search traffic on the web. No, they’re not going to get you as much traffic as Google could have gotten you, however, if you need an alternative source of traffic, optimizing for these sites is a good idea.
Direct Traffic
Getting your name known to the general public is an expensive proposition, but it is possible. Using things like traditional media as well as Internet ads will bring plenty of traffic to your site (and also make it harder for Google to completely ignore you). The catch of course as I said, is that this is an expensive option to choose.
Referral Traffic
Don’t forget that there are billions of web pages out there and each one of them does get visited at least on occasion (even the dead ones do get an occasional hit once in a long while). Getting your ad and or link onto those sites means effectively that you can bypass Google for traffic. Of course, doing this is both difficult and expensive.
Other Social Networks
Finally, this is a branch of referral traffic. There are hundreds of social networks of every shape and form aside from Facebook. Twitter of course is well known, but there are also lesser known sites such as Plurk and Classmates.com. Don’t forget as well about the social news sites such as Digg, StumbleUpon and Delicious.
Bottom Line
Life without Google would be extremely difficult and much more expensive. However it is possible to do it if you really tried. The question of course, as I said previously, is why on earth you’d want to do so? Really, live with Google’s restrictions. They’re not so onerous and frankly, your life will be much easier if you do live with it than without it.