This weekend I have been completing the user sign in functionality for my cocktail making website. I have been monitoring the SEO results for key terms such as “cocktail recipes”. A competitor has uploaded 10k cocktail recipes to google base and as such google has added a cocktail search box to the top of the search results page.
As a publisher I want traffic from google badly and to get that traffic it looks like I am going to have to gift them some content… in fact not just some content but all the content I have taken 5yrs to get hold of. At what stage will google say thanks for the content, give me an attribution and then not refer the users to my site 100% of the time?
Should the search engines be competing with every niche webmaster at the same time for content while being their lifeblood for traffic? Right now I simply don’t know but I am scared they will kill my little sites with their own content within the next few years.