Bronte Media

UPDATE: As if reading my mind, Seth Godin posts stats on Squidoo, the ultimate in organic search referrals.

Rich Skrenta of Topix has a fantastic post that provides more insight into their thinking around buying the topix.com domain name and the consequent nervousness around shifting the millions of pages they have indexed in Google under topix.net to the new domain.

He is a little defensive on the reaction around how dependent the site is on organic search referrals but does provide a well thought through point of view:

“To say that a content site should not rely on search engine traffic — most of which comes from Google — is naive. The web is 10 billion pages now, with a single point of entry. That’s the web the way works. If you want to have a web business, you have to acknowledge this reality.

Sites such as Wikipedia, Answers.com, About.com and TripAdvisor receive massive amounts of traffic from search engines. I would think that 50% would be a low guess. About, Answers.com and TripAdvisor are big businesses, and they would be completely clobbered if users stopped being able to find them from Google. This is not unusual; it is the norm. Barry Diller talked about the importance of SEO to his sites in his keynote at a recent conference. ”

He is right. Everywhere you look from Citysearch to Yelp to Insiderpages to Judys Book to Trulia to even Homethinking, most of the new user acquisition is through organic search. That’s just the way of life.