Maybe, since people would have a harder time finding other sites then my sites since they need to look for links in directories, forums, social networks and word of mouth instead of typing a word into a search engine.
Plus, spammers won't be able to spam search engines with links to get higher rankings if they don't exist.
The people who spam will get banned from forums, and blogs, and their links deleted, so they get no traffic.
While the people who work hard at being part of a community by posting good topics and using their signature and profile link to promote their website will get the most traffic from their hard work on forums, blogs, social networks, etc rather then spammy websites which rise to the top of some search engines because the owner of the post spammed the same link on thousands dead forums, websites, and blogs.
Plus, a lot of searches these days just bring people to encyclopedia and content-rich sites like Wikipedia instead of forums which is good for looking up information, but not as social as a forum.
Instant Messging, E-mail, word of mouth, signature links, link directories, social networks, YouTube Videos, guest blogging, t-shirts with links on them back to your site, bumper stickers with your link on cars, newspepers, posters, etc.
I find most useful sites mainly on people's forum signature, and links on blogs. I actually rarely visit sites which I found on search engines since most sites are not forums, or the community seems kind of dead, or does not interest me.
The power of E-mail and word of mouth is still very good at spreading links since you never know how many people will e-mail and spread the word of your website to friends and family around the world via e-mail and telephone,
Search engines are easy to find sites, but the spammers and companies with money are flooding the search results with lesser quality sites sometimes by hiring promoters to change their sites's articles and spread their backlinks to flood the first page of most search engines until they get caught by engines and their rankings get lower for spamming and unnaturally making their sites take over the first page, but then they just start all over again with new sites to rank high in search by hiring other people.
Search engines are good, but if you are an unknown site potential members may just go to the site that shows up first. I dont really search for forums..The only ones that I am a full on active member on are the ones that were shared with me by friends or other direct communications.
However, if I am looking for something specific like an answer, review, or something I just go to one of the first few sites to show up on google.
I wonder what will happen when search engine companies also become content creators, and rank search engine owned websites higher. Will people complain for not ranking more worthy sites higher, or just use other search engines which are not also content creators.
Google owns YouTube, Blogspot, Google Plus, and a bunch of other social networks and blog/web hosting sites, so Google can be considered a content creator, but most of the creators on their websites are not paid by Google unless they choose to be YouTube partners and Adsense Partners which get paid for producing content.
Search engines in the future might just make the first results the "answer" for a popular search since it will save users a lot of time instead of clicking on a website link to find simple answers like "what's the next version of Windows?" Search will just probably give the answer on the first result which will be "Windows 8".
The user also won't have to deal with website offline problems when a site is offline since if the search engine is online, the answer will be online.
Search engines might just hire a bunch of answer writers to write common answers for the most search questions and keywords, and if the answer is wrong or not what the user is searching for they can click on the website links in the results which are below the answers.
I have a feeling the occasional spammers I get on my forum just join to post links and make spammy topics in hopes of raising their Google search results for their spammy website since Google likes to rank sites higher in the search results which have more links pointing to their site, so spammer posts links in hopes of raising their search results.
My forum isn't really active, so I don't see much of a point for spammers to just post to get refferal traffic since there are not a lot of activity, so few people will click the link except for search engines.
