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I think that supports Chris' point. He isn't saying SEO doesn't matter, he's saying that pursuing SEO as a marketing strategy means you have to be very aggressi

I think that supports Chris' point. He isn't saying SEO doesn't matter, he's saying that pursuing SEO as a marketing strategy means you have to be very aggressive in order to get any traffic. Which makes it a non-viable strategy for startups that care about the user experience. My personal experience says he's right. And I think the Stack Overflow example does too. Even when SO redesigned itself to make the site more SEO-friendly it couldn't compete with some of its imitators -- presumably because Joel and team were averse to making changes that would hurt site usability and aesthetics.

jonknee 16y ago
> He isn't saying SEO doesn't matter, he's saying that pursuing SEO as a marketing strategy means you have to be very aggressive in order to get any traffic SO got very significant search traffic with little apparent effort (that may be too harsh, but they were certainly not very aggressive). http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/02/the-elephant-in-the-room-google-monoculture.html http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/02/the-elephant-in-the... This was before they made updates to deal with people out working them and at the time they were getting 83% of all their traffic from Google.
- trevelyan 16y ago
  It's probably fairer to say that Joel solved the chicken-egg problem by leveraging his existing community and fanning antipathy against experts-exchange. If the model was primarily SEO I'd expect them to have an easier time bootstrapping their non-tech related communities, especially now that they're investment-backed and can put money into user acquisition: http://gaming.stackexchange.com http://gaming.stackexchange.com http://cooking.stackexchange.com http://cooking.stackexchange.com All that said, I appreciate the thoughtful reply. It's rare for people to link to supporting data like this. And maybe you're right! Upvoted.

jonknee 16y ago

> He isn't saying SEO doesn't matter, he's saying that pursuing SEO as a marketing strategy means you have to be very aggressive in order to get any traffic SO got very significant search traffic with little apparent effort (that may be too harsh, but they were certainly not very aggressive). http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/02/the-elephant-in-the-room-google-monoculture.html http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/02/the-elephant-in-the... This was before they made updates to deal with people out working them and at the time they were getting 83% of all their traffic from Google.

trevelyan 16y ago
It's probably fairer to say that Joel solved the chicken-egg problem by leveraging his existing community and fanning antipathy against experts-exchange. If the model was primarily SEO I'd expect them to have an easier time bootstrapping their non-tech related communities, especially now that they're investment-backed and can put money into user acquisition: http://gaming.stackexchange.com http://gaming.stackexchange.com http://cooking.stackexchange.com http://cooking.stackexchange.com All that said, I appreciate the thoughtful reply. It's rare for people to link to supporting data like this. And maybe you're right! Upvoted.