Pretty amazing -- Answers.com has issued a press release to warn that its search traffic is down 28 percent due to "a search engine algorithmic adjustment by Google." It raises lots of issues -- how dependent should you be on search traffic; how the "definitions" links that Answers.com has from Google don't seem to generate that much traffic and whether it is really Answers.com that's on the outs with Google, rather than a general change.

Press releases or any type of official guidance from companies warning of search traffic losses are fairly rare. I just haven't seen much of them over the years. To me, the most famous example until now was when FTD warned sales were down in 2005 because it failed to pay enough attention to SEO. The head of marketing was replaced as part of that.

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