Comments on: You Don’t Need SEO to Rank in Google

By: MacSeth

MacSeth — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 13:28:51 +0000

First of all… very nice article… second of all: i want to share my thoughts about the subject:

- twitter is a system that works realtime… since google is more and more focussing on realtime items it is not strange that your site got crawled easily and got ranked so high within a couple of hours.
Do not forget that if you create a twitter-project you get a lot of links from other projects as well since the source is almost always showing the source of the tweet… after a couple of weeks, when most visitors stopped following/using the project, the bots will not find the links that easily to respective pages and may wipe them out of the index again. (the downside of realtime search you might say).

- SEO is in my opinion a long-term strategy and must come with good content in order to get to the top rankings for a long time (especially pages where realtime search is not needed ex wikipedia articles) . Also: It is always better to have a well enough optimized website with good content then having good content only.

By: ingilizce ian

ingilizce ian — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 12:08:25 +0000

Great article – and a point I agree with completely – marketing and authority will win the race long after seo tactics have proved outdated. Good work.

By: Juvaly

Juvaly — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 18:30:55 +0000

Rae, this is very interesting, and I also always believed and managed to “prove” to myself this is true. I believe bounce rates and CTR also have a major impact.

Btw, you mention launching the site – but how did you drive traffic to it initially?

By: Rae Hoffman

Rae Hoffman — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 17:19:36 +0000

Well Barrett, if you read the post, considering we didn’t get the Techcrunch mention until day 2 and all the indexings and rankings starting coming in early on day one, I’m going to say Techcrunch wasn’t the deciding factor.

By: Barrett

Barrett — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 01:05:53 +0000

How do you think it would have panned out if you hadn’t gotten a mention on Techcrunch? That is a very weighty source in search engines eyes and the content there is duplicated across the web through trackbacks. Twitter is your main source of users because Tweetwaster is a Twitter app. The nofollow link from there is your main source of users because Tweetwaster is a Twitter app it only makes sense. Twitter is also a newly trusted source by Google as it’s very interested in doing real time searching so it’s no surprise that a Twitter app would be picked up quick. If it wasn’t connected to an already popular source of users I’m not sure you would have had such a success and it’s only anecdotal evidence that SEO isn’t required to rank in Google.

By: Joanna Ciolek

Joanna Ciolek — Sun, 31 May 2009 04:28:27 +0000

Just like you suggest, you don’t need SEO to rank well in Google. However, as you detailed in your case study, such ranking (based solely on high traffic) will only be temporary. In all reality, you do need solid SEO to fall back on in a long run, no matter your industry / competitiveness.

By: kookoo

kookoo — Sun, 24 May 2009 13:55:35 +0000

“while considered a misspelling, Tweetwasters ranked #1 for the term “Tweetwasters” – over my own blog, which is pretty strong” – WOW! Isn’t this like example.com ranks #1 for “example” in google?! What’s so special about that. A 100% keyword domain will have a huge advantage when it comes to ranking for it’s name.

Also, I don’t really agree with the post. While the message is interesting, it is an exception. Do that with 5 sites, using a SYSTEM and you can say it is repeatable. Expand the SYSTEM to a point where it makes money and you can say you did something. Otherwise it’s just wasted bandwidth.

Your site was “buzz”. By definition (my definition) “buzz” means big fire that consumes itself fast. You got it at one point however – you can use a “technique” like this to get huge traffic, but you MUST have a way to convert it or keep it.

And your assumption that SEO means just on-site SEO is just wrong. That helps outrank a competitor that hasn’t done his homework but it won’t help you get near him. SEO is about RELEVANCE. That’s the quality factor in a 2-variable algorithm. The 2nd variable being of a quantitative nature – LINKS.

By: SEO Brighton

SEO Brighton — Sun, 17 May 2009 21:23:40 +0000

This shows the power of twitter, and what it can do for you and your website! We Should all learn something from this.

By: The Agra Indian

The Agra Indian — Thu, 07 May 2009 20:52:09 +0000

Still Page Rank holds at least 50% value in ranking on result page. If we leave some web sites that have very unique content or services, most of the web sites in the world need SEO.

Most of the web sites in the world are not owned by people who know very well about search engine, the are owned by individuals and some of those are even not aware of the basic of computers so they need a service that can optimize their web site for them to get traffic.

By: Aman

Aman — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 14:05:46 +0000

I read your post but I do not agree 100%. Without little effort and initial investments for SEO we cant get starting traffic. I agree that after we have good traffic we will get natural links and also good rankings but to start a new site I think we need some time and Investment on money to run a successful website.