Google's recent re-index, now infamously dubbed "Florida," has many webmasters in a tizzy. Most of the howls of pain have coming from professional optimizers and spammers. But Google's not in business to cater to them, anyway. Quite the opposite. A minority of complaints, though, come from honest businesses who have been hard hit by a drop in rankings at holiday time. Even for these cases, though, there is only so much sympathy one should be expected to expend.

Online pioneers are a resourceful and resilient lot. Looking back over the past few years, there have been many ways of building subscriber lists, customer lists, readerships, and even - yes - fat wallets and country homes, from no-cost or ridiculously low-cost promotional loopholes that have existed on the 'net.

The deal has always been like this, though: at some point, the loophole closes. The implicit market becomes explicit, and what had been free now comes with a cost. Acquire your customers on the cheap, while you can. But as you do so, remember to build a real business, one that can stand on its own if any given freebie gets shut down. Learn how to invest in marketing that pays off. Realize that if the only way you can survive is to get free advertising, you're not going to survive unless you look really good in a chicken suit.

At times like this - when aggrieved parties are vastly exaggerating the damage that has been done to them by a third party, a company that owes them precisely nothing, and arguably, one that may have served them hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of value on a platter since 1998 - it's probably worth itemizing a "how do I survive without free traffic" plan.

Itemize the various means of inexpensive promotion you've been handed over the years outside of Google results, and ask yourself whether you'd have been so lazy about converting all those prospective customers into an ongoing revenue stream if you hadn't been getting so much traffic so easily from the mighty SE-du-jour. To the publisher who's lost all their rankings for erotic content: don't people still find you through Google Groups? Have you ever thought of thanking Google for essentially rescuing that and keeping it going as a public service?

The notion that a pre-IPO Google needed to initiate a "shakedown" is romantic and exciting, perhaps, but as someone who has watched the day-to-day realities of Google's massive advertising revenue stream, it strikes me that Google, like Overture, has implemented so many enhancements and expansions of the advertising program itself - some which equally ticked-off advertisers - that they have no need to blatantly exploit their control over the free index. Pay-per-click keyword advertising is going to make Google all the money it needs because keyword inventory is scarce, and there are bidding wars.

This type of language that casually gets tossed around in forums - shakedown, protection money, etc. - is all too easy and all too common when it comes to Internet companies (Yahoo, LookSmart, Google) that have done the mature thing and implemented business models that might do the previously unthinkable: lead to economic viability. Anyone who works in the Internet sector, you'd think, would be mindful that unfairly harsh criticism of a major role model in "our" ranks can only detract from the process of replacing dumb, outdated, slow business practices with newer, more efficient ones. The productivity of the average US worker surged 9.4 percent in Q3 2003, continuing the trend of the last 12 years. It's companies like Google that have driven such productivity gains. You'd think more business owners, especially those who have benefited from the past four years of free search referrals, would be wanting to work with, not against, such a bold creator of value.