In reply to Liam Roberts.

Any business that rely on traffic driven through Google to survive is doomed to fail. Never in history a private company has had so much power over the destiny of an entire economy. They change their algorithm and you are out of business overnight. If you want to build a serious long term business you must pretend that Google doesn't even exists and build a marketing campaign based on other means of driving traffic, and consider every visitor coming from Google as a nice free gift.

I've been in the SEO game, and I abandoned it because I was sick of Google and their lies. If they decide that you are disturbing their business or the business of one of the big ad spenders they manipulate the results and cancel you.

Ryan's error is to rely on Google. There's no need of negative SEO to put you out of business. They change their algorithm: you are out. They mark your site as spammer as a result of an error: you are out. They think that your site has been hacked (maybe it wasn't): you are out.

It is of course hard to build a business without Google. You must use many sources of traffic, each driving a few visitors, instead of one driving many. You must work every day to build your audience. But once you've done it you have built a business that will last because you don't depend on a single source of traffic.