The stickiness of geometry in SketchUp often frustrates new users, especially those used to another CAD paradigm. Many times you will want to disengage some geometry from things around it so that editing operations do not affect the adjacent faces and edges.
Groups are just like components but, unlike components, a copy of a group does not know about any other copies. That is, they are single instances of an object. Groups do not have definition names like components, and they do not show in the component browser. However, Groups do show in the Outliner. Groups in the outliner are shown with a solid square beside the name, Components are shown with a set of four smaller squares in a grid pattern to show this item is repeatable.
Groups are for gathering geometry into a single object, either temporarily, or for long term use. As shown above, groups can be used to quickly isolate a piece of geometry from the rest of the model. Then edit that new group and make your editing changes, adding edges, moving points and edges, etc. Then close the group edit, and explode the group back to raw geometry. It will merge back with the adjacent geometry only where they share edges. With a little clean up, the changed geometry will be re-connected to the whole model.
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