Google is having some issues this week.

On Friday, SEO Junkies was nicely indexed and up to date with the latest cache date being the 18th November 2011. On Monday that cached date was the 17th November 2011.

Ordinarily this wouldn’t be an issue except that I’d made some changes to the page on Friday that had the effect of bumping us up 4 places, and so now we’re back where we were on Thursday.

Now aside from the fact that this is incredibly frustrating on a personal level, and makes me think that Google is actually out to get me…. It got me thinking about how much we all rely on Google, and how tragic it would be if the system suddenly stopped.

Why do we rely on Google?

OK yes Google is just one of a selection of Search Engines, but it holds over 80% of the search market in the UK alone. This is a serious market share and is a large part of the reason why Google is being hauled over the coals for Antitrust practices.

With that in mind you can start seeing why it is essential that your website places on Page 1 on Google for your targeted key terms. Even if you place well on Bing, or Yahoo, you are still missing a dramatic amount of search volume for your products and services. Google is searched everyday by around 3.5 million adults every day, a figure that keeps growing, and only 1% of those ever click into page 2 of the Google SERPs. In fact 40% of these searches will only ever click on the first result so while page 1 is great, position 1 (increasingly position 2 in these days of Wikipedia being a vital result for EVERYTHING) is the dogs danglies.

So how much do we all rely on Google?

Waaaay too much, which makes it all the more annoying when they start messing around with our cache dates!