Have you ever heard the phrase “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket”? This tidbit of wisdom, passed down for generations, refers to not relying on just one thing when the outcome is critical. Savvy investors spread their money among several types of investments. Google doesn’t have everything on one server or network. These are examples of what the phrase means.

Too Many Eggs, Not Enough Baskets

Today, I received an email from Zlio. They’re a company that provided a unique way for people to create online shops and earn money. It was pretty innovative when it began, but I had forgotten about it for the last year or three. Today’s email from Zlio was intended to announce the end of life for their services due to the end of the company, but it also provided some details about how this happened. Those details underline my message.

Six years after its launch, we regret to announce that we are going out of business.

The service will officially end on September 11!

Zlio had a fantastic start, receiving capital from one Europe’s largest venture capital funds, Mangrove Capital. In addition, we held advanced M&A talks with Google, which unfortunately fell through at the last minute.

Our strong initial growth was interrupted on September 27, 2007, when the majority of Zlio shops, which were generally very well ranked, saw their Google ranking drop dramatically, eliminating 65% of our traffic.

Despite our best efforts, and the opening of 380,000 stores to date, it has not been possible to regain our previous Google rankings, except in exceptional cases.

When we founded Zlio, we thought that you, members of Zlio, would successfully promote your shops among your circles. We did not believe that Google referencing would be so crucial. Unfortunately, it has proved to be indispensable.

Among the actions taken to improve our Google ranking, we approached an SEO company who claimed they were able to fix our problem.

In view of their poor performance, we assessed that this company had not fulfilled its obligations. Therefore, we entered into dispute with it, which resulted in a court case whose sentence was rendered on July 26, 2011. This ruling is available on the website of the Paris Commercial Court (Tribunal de Commerce de Paris).

This decision sentences us both to pay the whole of a service that we still believe have not been provided and to pay damages for publishing our opinion about Referencement on Twitter. The latter part of the sentence has already drawn much attention in the French media.

This sentence means we cannot go on. The service has been losing money for several years (which forced us to gradually reduce our staff), and the amounts to which we are sentenced to pay today no longer allow us to meet our obligations.

The email goes on to point out that they will honor amounts owed to Zlio shop owners, etc., but the important thing to note is how they describe a timeline in which they saw some early success with their Google placement that abruptly went away, and how the resulting actions ended up putting them out of business. This may be a unique case, but if you do some searching on Google, you’ll find that every time Google changes its search placement algorithms, scores of blogs and web sites speak out about how they’ve lost over half their traffic. To some sites, this becomes catastrophic.

Protect Your Web Traffic

Search engine optimization is a huge factor in the success of most websites. I’m not here to tell you otherwise, but while optimizing to make sure Google sends you a lot of qualified traffic, don’t forget other marketing channels. Share your voice on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+, check your rankings in Yahoo and Bing, comment on blogs and in forums, and hand out business cards at events. Whatever you do, spread those eggs around in many baskets and you’ll be one step ahead of everyone else when the industry shifts.