Remember earlier this year when I blogged about Jennifer Laycock’s challenge to kick the four major search engines to the curb and prove you could launch a business online without them?
Well I just noticed that the site she launched, BentoYum has now opened the doors to search engines again. There’s no bot restrictions in the robots.txt, it’s got a healthy Google toolbar PageRank of 4 out of 10, Google has indexed 284 pages and it was last cached on December 3.
So I wonder when this happened? The last installment of the Hide and Speak series that I can find is Develop Very Thick Skin published at the end of July. Did something happen to prompt opening the doors to search engines? Did Jenn make a post about it and I missed it?
I’m guessing that Jenn and business partner Abigail decided that their point had been made, that you CAN launch a successful business online without search engine help and they’ve moved on. But clarification would be nice!
I was following series of posts by Jennifer also. Wonder what happened?
Why would anyone want to not be in google, yahoo, etc? Why limit yourself? That really seems to be a terrible business plan. I guess they are afraid to make money? I get the point of not wanting to support the big guys… but how does a small start up want to exclude themselves from what prooves to everyone else in the SE world beneficial?
@Chris - did you read the first article in the series? Jenn explains her motivation behind the challenge. In a nutshell, she was trying to prove to small businesses that they don’t need Google or the other big guns to survive on the web. Google is not the Internet. A business can successfully market itself using word of mouth and social media muscle. I think she proved her point very well!
Ahh maybe so. Guess I need to do a little more digging. But I wonder what her gurantee would have been if she failed. I wouldn’t rest my business on excluding the big guys especially in the critical startup period. What is reassuring about the idea is that someone may have proven it can be done. I will do some reading and be back soon with a follow up. Maybe next time a little less hasty.
Ok so I read all the articles. I get the point. It is really more of a how to market in social media. Not exclude your business from the big search engines. After reading these articles I am like you she has done a good job proving her point.
By the way she does have a newer post up dated in September: http://www.searchengineguide.com/jennifer-laycock/hide-and-speak-6.php
I have enjoyed Jennifer’s witting for several months. I especially like her no none sense approach to explaining things. I find her views on topics such as “the sandbox” very refreshing. She makes so much sense, when she exposes the fraud in many of the theory based beliefs in our SEO universe.
Until now,that is!..
While, I admire her stance on the major search engines. One voice in the wilderness isn’t very loud. Perhaps, if others made a stand and joined forces things might eventually change.
The fact is that many businesses rely on the search engines and specifically Google for the survival. Their business model is built around search engine driven traffic. It would be especially suicidal for SEO companies to support this kind of behavior. Since we are an SEO company we will continue paying homage to the tools that provide our substance.
We encourage our clients to market there website beyond just the SEs. This practice does take time and effort, but it is much wiser to many baskets with eggs, than to have all your eggs in a singular baskets.
We all should support her in anyway we can. We should also pay close attention to her creative approaches o developing traffic. She has given a much to our community and business. Thanks…
@ Chris - ah yes, I had read that last entry of Jenn’s. I’d just forgotten or they weren’t very well inter-linked.
@ Geri - I like your multi-basket analogy, very apt! I don’t think Jenn was encouraging everyone to abandon search engines. It was more of an interesting experiment to prove there is more to Internet marketing than just Google. The series grabbed my attention because I am inundated with questions from webmasters who obsess about Google and I too find that frustrating.
I never even heard about it, but that sounded like a cool experiment. My goal for SEO clients is that they’d never rely on a #1 ranking, so I totally understand where they’re coming from. Ask many well-branded business whose traffic primarily comes from referrals where the bread-and-butter of their profit comes from.
Just heard from Jen today and it seems she has been totally swamped with her SEG responsibilities combined with looking after 2 sick children. So she hopes to post an update on this experiment when she catches her breath. Suffice to say that letting the engines in was a marketing decision in the best interests of the site and brought forward due to lack of time for marketing the site via purely social media. Thanks for the email Jen!
Thanks Kalena! Sorry for the delay on this. Your post gave me the motivation to get an update posted to wrap up the series.
I would have loved to take it further, but this one just wasn’t meant to be.
Full post explaining what happened and summarizing what was learned available here: http://www.searchengineguide.com/jennifer-laycock/hide-and-speak-letting-the-spiders-back.php
[…] not to mention an impressive bento designer! Within 24 hours of emailing me in response to my post Jennifer finally opens the door to Google, she’s posted the long-awaited final installment of her article series about a building an […]
Thanks for the final installment in the story Jen!