Google has had a massive impact on the web. Between organic listings, Adsense, and Adwords, Google has minted many six figure incomes and millionaires. The money is there are its going to be for years to come.

Unfortunately its not all a happy field of flowers. Having a handful of top organic listings driving 90% of your sales, combined with a warehouse and employees is a high risk venture. The good news is diversified entrepreneurs are less susceptible to these fluctuations.

Between launching a questionable quality score in Adwords to announcements that buying links makes your a spammer, Google’s karma has taken quite a hit in the past year. The whole part about storing massive quantities of user data and going on billion dollar spending binges has some wondering if Sergey and Larry will overtake Bill Gates as computing’s Darth Vader.

Regardless, relying on Google for your livelihood sucks. Here are a few ways you can help avoid algorithm catastrophes — paid and organic.

1. Expand your traffic sources. If you are buying adwords ads look into other options including Yahoo, MSN (if you haven’t already), second tier networks, direct ad buys, and CPM image buys.

2. Word of mouth. This does not work for all niches. If it doesn’t work for yours figure out how to make it work.

3. Multiply your portfolio. Do you own a website about health spas? Own 250 websites about health spas. If you absolutely must have the organic traffic then you better be ready to bust your ass to get it because thousands of other people are doing just the same.

4. Hook the traffic you do recieve. Get e-mail addresses and RSS subscriptions and work hard to keep them.

5. Build strong community relations. Its common practice to avoid sending traffic to competitors. Some forums will ban you for posting links to another forum in the same niche. (Good or bad practice? Thats for another post.) Whats important is that you have an “in” on major sites in your niche. Those forums might not touch you if you have another forum, but if you have a blog, your a friend.

6. Most importantly, be flexible. There are a heck of a lot of web developers who have Google hardwired into their brain. Building a successful site means building lots of content, getting backlinks, and moving up in the ranks. If you find yourself rigidly following a 4 year old post on Webmaster World about how to get 3,000 uniques a day from Google, watch out.

I have contemplated the difference between doing well and doing ok for a long time. Is it working harder that really makes you more money? Not really.

Its the ability to react to an environment using it to your benefit which puts you at the top. For years now web developers have been doing just that with Google. Easy traffic, why not? The question is, what happens when the playing board changes?

I have made it a personal point to aggresively study my web sites and learn how they work and why they make money. You should probably do the same. I sense a major change on the horizon. In two years, search will be completely unrecognizable from where it is today (feel free to call me on that.)