Why do I care if Google likes my blog?

Have you ever opened Google.com and entered site:your-domain-name to see if any of your blog posts have been indexed? Or do you look at your analytics and get a twinge of excitement when you see Google referring traffic to your blog? I'm guilty on both counts. I like the idea of the "small web" but this need to be loved by Google is probably antithetical to what the small web movement is about. Yet as a former digital analytics analyst in a past life, I have a hard time not craving organic search engine traffic. Call it a moral failing or an addiction or both. I know what I should really value more is another blogger linking to me. That kind of referral traffic means someone read something I wrote and it resonated with them. So much so that they were willing to give me a little piece of their digital real estate in the form of a link. I think those referring links from other blogs should mean more to me than any page indexed by Google. And I need to make more attempts to return the…