Quitting Google: Looking for feedback

Face it, you hate Google. They’ve become the Microsoft of the 21st century. Except they’re 1000 times worse. Literally you find yourself unable to live without the mighty Google. They’ve become intergral to everything you do online. Their existance allows you to function and it makes you sick.

It seems there is a growing discontentment among webpreneurs regarding Google. I’m one of them. Not because their services don’t work, but because their policies are absurd and you never really know where you stand with anything because they refuse to give yes or no answers when you ask a question. I sent an email asking if Blog Rush was ok under their Adsense policy. I got a canned response basically saying artificial traffic generation might get my account banned. Thanks Google, as always I appreaciate your straight forward answer…

Before I go any further I should explain that the title of this post Quitting Google isn’t entirely accurate. I’m simply in the consideration stage about what it will entail and actually mean. Once I figure that out I will either quit in full or quit those services I absolutely can live without. Speaking of services here are the ones I use and what they do. Any suggestions on alternate FREE programs with the same functions as these would be great!

Adwords

Adwords is Google’s PPC (pay per click) program which allows us to cheaply advertise our websites. I’ve signed up for an account but I never use this. I know there are a few alternatives such as Yahoo Search Marketing, but I haven’t actually checked them out yet. You might be wondering why I care if I don’t use it in the first place. Because within the next few months I plan on doing so.

Alerts

This service allows you to keep track of the usage of keywords and phrases. It’s a powerful marketing tool that I’ve only used once and that for testing. Since I’m not huge into monetization of my blog I’m not looking for a replacement for this.

Analytics

This is Google’s site stat package. It gives a lot of useful information regarding visitors to your site. This is one that I wouldn’t quit using as I’ve found it to be very comprehensive and useful.

Blogger

Google’s blogging service. I have a couple of blogs there, but nothing I couldn’t move elsewhere. At this point I have need for this service due to other blogs, but I’d love to quit this one as well.

Calendar

An online calendar to share with your friends. Think of Outlook’s calendar, or lightening. This is an easy one to lose as aside from the initial test it’s something I never use.

Docs

Google Docs is basically an online office suite. Everything is stored online and thus available to you whereever you might have an internet connection. I’ve used this extensively at different points over the past several months. This is one of those gray areas. I don’t like that everything is stored on Google’s servers, but it is so damn convient…

Gmail

Google Mail, more affectionately known as “Gmail”. This is one of the few services that Google provides I consider essential. There’s no way I would quit this service.

Groups

Google’s discussion groups. I see reason not to continue using these as they are run by individuals not the Google entity

Reader

Google Reader lets you keep up with RSS feeds. Very useful tool, but then so are the other 50,000 of them out on the market now. I’ve signed up for one, but I only use it once every few weeks. No great loss to get rid of this.

Webmaster Tools

This is a suite of tools designed to aid an assist webmasters in the day to day operation of their site. I have an account but I have never used this thing. Getting rid of it won’t hurt a bit.

Adsense

I saved the big one for last. Adsense of course is Google’s ad selling program which allows us to make a few extra dollars. For most people when I say “few” I mean just that. If I sold the current Google Adsense slot at the top of each post (see it here to get an idea of where it is) would anyone be interested in advertising there? It appears on every individual page that loads. I get 500+ unique visitors a day with 2500 page views a day. Not tons but it might be worth your effort to advertise something there.

My next question is how will not using these things affect me? Will there be any negative impact? For the most part I don’t believe so. For example selling the adspace directly to someone has been proven time and time again a much better idea than trying to monetize with adsense. The rest of those services aside from email and analytics have pretty much no bearing on blogging at all. If you believe I’ve forgotten something, that there is reason not to dump any of those programs please leave a comment about it in this posting!

I’ve saved this for very last. Delisting of this site on Google. There’s other search engines out there, but Google is the “big boy” on the block. I get less than 3% of my traffic from Google searches. I’ve never bothered to optimize for SEO. If I was to delist myself how much of a problem would that cause me in the future? Can I make up the Google traffic via another search engine or source? I believe I can, but more feedback would be great.