I would say losing organic real estate to an answer box is a double whammy. It's gut check time. If the effort to gain that page one is worth it, then great. I'm sure people with special interests in selling hope of getting that page 1 ranking will continue to spin. That's understandable. If somebody asked me for advice I would certainly not be selling them fools gold which is the promise of high organic rankings. Seems like a fad that has had it's day. But as they say, keep the dream alive.

With this thread relegated to the conspiracy section, the discussion is all but dead. Thanks to all for the insight and discussion prior.

I have new goals set based on a lot of what has been said. I'm not sure this is farewell, but certainly the thought of gaining traction in a failing business model is a WASTE OF TIME AND EFFORT. The business model I see no growth in? That is the one in which I'm going to compete for shrinking ranking positions on page 1 of Google and try to guess which inquiries may or may not be gobbled up by the answer box. No thanks, I will pass. Obviously a number of people's business depends on selling the idea of the promised land. Hard to sell people who know better.

Nobody came up with a solid or credible reason as to why the answer box improves click through rates and organic traffic.

But crossroads? If you're going to use entire A to Z answers from websites, how do you justify an alto that is there to find the best search results? It needs to be said what the purpose is now. That's the crossroads Google has. It's the crossroads that Cutts is at when he openly questions paying for those answers. Crossroads is where your conscious starts getting the better of you.

Most people struggle looking past today. That is clear. Organic isn't dead today, but it would be like investing a bunch of money into a company like BlackBerry. Some would advise it for sure. That is how I view this subject now.

The problem with Google is that so many small businesses have been decimated by various algorithm twiddling that SEO has degenerated into a cargo-cult religion where the high priests of SEO try to divine the intentions of Google by the latest movements in SERPs rather than by hard headed analysis.

Google's FUD about "unnatural" links has damaged the link structure of the web and many new websites are unlikely to link to others or have inbound links. Part of this is due to the idea that the search engines will find the site anyway. Google's site detection is based mainly on blind link crawling and without links, there is little or no site detection. The alternative is to use data from other sources such as Adsense and Google Analytics to provide new sites. The zonefiles also provide a source of new sites but there is often a delay between a domain being registered and a website appearing on it. Of course some TLDs have over 50% PPC parked or holding pages and little development so this is like wading through acres of mud to find one diamond. Many of the country code registries don't allow zonefile access for their ccTLDs so Google is, in effect, shut out when it comes to easily detecting new sites on those ccTLDs.

Google's latest effort, Google Domains, has Google becoming a registry and a registrar selling domain names. The official line is that Google really cares about meaningful domains. The reality is that there are approximately 1.29 million com/net/org/biz/info/mobi/asia websites on particular Google IP ranges. (I ran a full com/net/org/biz/info/mobi/asia website IP mapping project in June) and if Google can convince some of these domain registrants to shift to Google as a registrar, then it will make inroads in the domains business and the hosting business. (There's a video of the Google I/O presentation on Youtube. Some of it is quite clueless about the domain name business but there are important indications as to the strategies and plans.) It will also have a continual source of new websites. Being really cynical that whole Getting Business Online scheme that Google ran over the last few years was providing Google with low end of the market new content. The Google Analytics and Adwords vouchers were often part of the promotions with a few key players in various countries. However these are cookiecutter sites with few links, inbound or outbound and many are just the equivalent of online business cards.

Google is at a crossroads but it is a multi-levelled crossroads. The Social Media angle is a major problem for Google and it has not been able to deal with players like Facebook and Twitter. Google has closed Buzz and Orkut. Google Plus lost Vic Gundotra in April. The side effect of the rise of Facebook has been that more links are being communicated through Facebook and Twitter by personal recommendation. The volume of net new domain name registrations in .COM has been falling since April. While .COM normally grew by between 300K and 550K registrations per month, the last few months have only seen it grow by about 140K a month. Domain name registration patterns move on a yearly basis and this could be part of a consolidation trend that has been affecting the other legacy TLDs over the last few years. I don't know if there will be a fallback to 2005/2006 levels in domain registration but there is massive duplication in domain names with the commonest pair being the COM/NET. A registrant might register the .COM and .NET versions of their domain name or if they are registering a ccTLD domain, they may register the .COM version of their domain if it is available. The active web is actually a lot smaller than people think. Most just see the domain name counts for .COM (113.6 million domains approximately) and think that they are all active websites. They are not. Probably less than 35% would have active/unique websites. And with the rise of the walled gardens like Facebook and Twitter, developing websites and registering domain names is not quite as important as it once was. It could be argued that the web is moving back, in parts, towards an AOL model.

Building an audience is probably going to be the new SEO. However that's going to wipe out a lot of SEO practitioners because only one thing builds an audience - compelling content. And compelling content doesn't necessarily need Google when it can use other avenues such as Social Media to spread the word. That's the really important existential crossroads for Google - the possibility that it may lose its position as gatekeeper on the web.

Regards...jmcc

You've really got a way with upsetting the Google fanboys and fangirls.

As was not my intention ...

As I've said ...

"Most everyone here will have the tenacity to evolve right along with the net .. I don't think we are the ones with the problem - We've evolved before, we'll evolve again. We're fairly scalable in that regard."

Google's bottom line is money .. The Web Developer, SEO, Webmaster, and site owner's bottom line is money.

When these two camps arrive at loggerheads on the net, things will change - It's inevitable - Google knows this.

Google will only provide organic results as long as it suits them to do so. Once it's positioned itself on the net to being able to make money without these results, things will change swiftly, and the last vestages of being a genuine search engine will disappear. Monetizing free search/results/organics has been the bane of any search engines existance for years. So far, Google has been the only one out there that has monetized it's core search to any great degree successfully. It's been a long road for them and it's taken billions of man hours to get to this point.

But the party can't last - We've only to go back and look at how things have always played out on the net in order to understand how things will evolve for Google.

I look at the doublespeak of Matt Cutts as just another corporate attempt to keep everyone's eyes on the ball. Attention is the name of the game, not relevant results.

Google has already peaked .. we've already had the opportunity to savour the flavour of Google's glory days - The perfect blend in the relationship between Google and it's webmasters/site owners who vie for the best results are over .. and have been for a while now.

It might be wise for any webmaster to look at the bigger picture when it comes to dealing with the larger corporate structures like that of Google and Microsoft among others, and realise that all corporations are the same -- Once webmasters can come to terms with how things play out in that regard and in that light, it might effect change in how they present themselves or their clients to the WWW.

Google isn't any more or less evil than any other corporation. They all use the same playbook, deploy all of the same technique and tools - There isn't anything at all new or innovative about it.

This isn't at all about fan-boys -- It's about what you are willing to believe. If you're comfortable hanging on every single word that comes out of the Google corporate spin, then fine -- but there's a World Wide Web out there that's waiting for you -- it's been there since before Google, and it will be there long after Google is gone. Google is absolutely not the end-all to anything internet - and the sooner one comes to understanding this, the easier it will be to diversify and eventually evolve into being the very best you can be.

Corporate entities like Google are only rungs on a very long ladder - that's all. If you look at Google for what it really is, then you might begin to understand that you are only half the way up that ladder ..

We call all talk about the corporate way. Many people lecture webmasters not to rely on one source for traffic. At this point it's all rhetoric.

Key aspects of search? To gain search organic traffic you really need page 1. It's clear that in the recent past the real estate for page 1 organic listings has shrunk.

Ads on top, ads (as many as 3 I've seen) on bottom. Combine that with a possible answer box now? Clearly unless you consider yourself presidential, mayoral or model material, you're not going to be the chosen one. Go ahead and make a run for being the president. Have fun and I hope when you fail you actually have something tangible at the end of that attempt.

For Google and Bing, there is no argument to debate. The organic page 1 listings took a massive hit with the increase of the answer box. So seeing 10 results dwindle to 6 isn't out of the question. It's not going to get better in the months following.

The crossroads that I see is this. Brighter minds might be able to explain the difference between a radio station paying royalties on songs played and what Google and others are doing by showing an A-Z answer scraped off somebody's website. Is that link at the end of the answer really payment enough? It's a free lunch for now. A radio station needs content to sell ads. Songs provide their content. My content is helping Google keep people on Google because they took my answer in its entirety. They get the pie, I get the crumbs. Things that are created (like music, movies or written articles/books) should never be free to use as a default. It's the web and obviously boundaries are going to get pushed to the max especially where corporations are concerned. Image search? Who needs the source these days? That was the start apparently.

It's an ethical crossroads. Newspapers took issue with snippets. Webmasters are okay with the WHOLE DAMN LUNCH being taken and used. Which camp are the dummies?

So let's simplify the the point of the thread. Google is at an ethical crossroads. Disagree? Explain how answer boxes don't infringe. Is being online a free license for everyone to take and use freely? To populate a corporate search engine featuring ads and services? If I take the most useful chunk of your content and copy it onto my site word for word and simply provide a source link at the bottom, you're suggesting there is no problem with it? The question then comes whether or not we even need copyright infringement submissions or forms to tell Google that somebody is ranking above us with our own content. Uh huh, isn't the answer box really ranking above me and shouldn't that be reported?

So let's simplify the the point of the thread. Google is at an ethical crossroads. Disagree?

Google went over the moral crossroads a long time ago.

To touch on the answer box; I'm wondering just what it's purpose is. Does Google think it improves the user experience? It certainly annoys the h**l out of me as it pushes the stuff I want to look at further down the page. Just why are they doing it?