People only find things "in Google" if Google ranks said things highly. The ranking algorithms are only minimally a function of content quality, as in how highly a human would rank the value of a piece of content. To rank, you need a solid backlink profile and a site structure that plays nice with G's SEO guidelines. So you need to market (build backlinks) to have any chance of driving search traffic.
In other words, getting traffic through google is only a function of having good content insofar as good content is easier to market, i.e. convince people to link to.
Simply not true. Good content will develop natural backlinks over time, you don't need to create them via marketing. To say that Google can't find a site with first marketing it is simply not true.
Now if you're a business, of course you want to market because it's faster than relying on organic growth, but faster doesn't mean sites that don't do SEO and marketing won't get traffic, they just won't get as much traffic as they could have.
> So you need to market (build backlinks) to have any chance of driving search traffic.
You can start a blog and just load it with good content and the traffic will slowly and steadily build as long as the content is good and new content keeps visitors coming back. You don't need to market it.
To say SEO is required is to say that Google is stupid; they are not.
Good sir. Please pause and think more deeply about what you are saying.
> To say that Google can't find a site with first marketing it is simply not true.
I did not say Google couldn't find it. I said Google will not rank it highly, which is true. Backlink profile is a huge part of the ranking algorithm and a page won't rank without good links pointing at least at the domain, if not the exact page.
So if you write a bunch of excellent content but don't develop a backlink profile, your site will be indexed on page 10,000 of results or whatever. Yes, people could technically find it. No, they won't find it. Revisit the studies where the top 3 results on the first SERP get 95%+. Hence the need for backlinks in order to drive organic search traffic. That is, marketing.
>To say SEO is required is to say that Google is stupid
No, that logic does not hold. To say SEO is required is to say that Google has a set of rules [1] it follows to rank pages relative to one another, and that webmasters who want traffic need to build pages/content according to these rules.
G doesn't publish its own SEO guidebooks for nothing.
I hear your position over and over again from developers who have a zealous disdain for marketing but know little about marketing. You presume that SEO is in itself something bad and evil that only evil bad people have to do, because good products speak for themselves and therefore earn merit.
Well, no. Google's algorithms are not sentient, they do not define merit subjectively based on qualitative things as humans do. Merit in Google's eyes is conforming to a certain set of rules. And SEO is basically just following those rules.
Google's rules are that pages with more links get ranked more highly. So if you want people to ever find your content through organic search, you must do some word-of-mouth to drive that initial traffic to your content.
> Backlink profile is a huge part of the ranking algorithm and a page won't rank without good links pointing at least at the domain, if not the exact page.
Yes, but backlinks don't just come from marketing, which you seem to be presuming.
> So if you write a bunch of excellent content but don't develop a backlink profile
Again, good content will get backlinks organically, not just from marketing.
> Yes, people could technically find it. No, they won't find it.
This is quite simply false, people do find, tons of tons of blogs get the majority of their traffic from Google with no marketing from the blog owner. Good content will wind up on sites like this or reddit and backlinks will follow.
> I hear your position over and over again from developers who have a zealous disdain for marketing but know little about marketing.
I don't think you're actually listening very well to what those developers are trying to convey.
> You presume that SEO is in itself something bad and evil that only evil bad people have to do, because good products speak for themselves and therefore earn merit.
You don't know what I presume, how about you not tell me what I think and worry about conveying your own position thank you.
Marketing and SEO make a site grow faster, but it's wrong to think a site can't get traffic and grow without them.
Google's job is to find and display good content to their users, not to find and display sites which market themselves to death but don't have good content. Good content is the key ingredient, not SEO and marketing. Backlinks are but one of many factors involved in ranking, and their goal is finding good content, not finding the most linked content.
>Yes, but backlinks don't just come from marketing, which you seem to be presuming.
I'm not presuming that. If someone finds a piece of great content via organic search on page 10,000 of the SERPS and then links it, great. That's possible and I haven't precluded the possibility. I'm saying it's incredibly unlikely and rarely happens in reality.
You are technically correct that given an infinite span of time a blogger who puts no effort into obtaining links will eventually get linked to via users who hit from page 10k of the SERPs. For our purposes as humans who have finite and short lifespans I am not satisfied giving any weight to the presupposition of an infinite timespan. So I reject your argument and state that the vast majority of first backlinks come from marketing, including stuff like telling your friends on twitter that you wrote a blog post, which is marketing.
>tons of tons of blogs get the majority of their traffic from Google with no marketing from the blog owner.
In practice this rarely if ever happens. Show me a successful blogger who doesn't submit her posts to the aggregators, linkbait from forums, share posts on Facebook, do guest blog posts on other blogs, etc. first, before there is a loyal following to do the submitting themselves.
SEO and marketing precedes organic growth, always. And probably a lot of what you're terming "organic growth" falls under the umbrella of SEO and marketing.
>Good content will wind up on sites like this or reddit and backlinks will follow.
Once blogs pick up steam this indeed becomes a thing. Before blogs pick up steam it is generally the author or a marketing agency doing the submitting, e.g. marketing.
>Google's job is to find and display good content to their users
Based on a definition of good that Google has defined in a very precise way. Have you read The Paper? G draws the conclusion from a healthy backlink profile that since other people believe the content to be good enough to link to it is probably good. Hence the disproportionate weight placed on backlink profiles in ranking algorithms vis-a-vis other factors. Backlinks in themselves are a measure of good content according to Google.
>Good content is the key ingredient, not SEO and marketing
Only insofar as if you market a turd, it won't pick up steam. SEO is nothing more than following the rules to get indexed. If you don't follow the rules, you won't get indexed, and likely won't see organic growth from search. The rules state that in order to rank higher, you need backlinks. The backlinks preclude the higher ranking and thus as a logical necessity the growth.
>Backlinks are but one of many factors involved in ranking, and their goal is finding good content, not finding the most linked content.
For Google, finding the most linked content (combined with assessment of the link profile, e.g. good vs bad neighborhoods etc.) is a means to finding good content. Google cannot assess what makes content good without assessing the backlink profile heavily, because the entire philosophy driving the SERPs is that good = linked to.
Linked to not equal to marketing, it's as simple as that. The idea that only marketed content gets traffic is simply absurd and nothing you can say will convince me otherwise because I simply know better from nearly a decade and a half experience building websites. Beyond that we'll just agree to disagree.
In other words, getting traffic through google is only a function of having good content insofar as good content is easier to market, i.e. convince people to link to.