Many of the today’s most successful informational sites such as Yelp, Wikipedia and TripAdvisor relied heavily on SEO for their initial growth. Their marketing strategy (whether deliberate or not) was roughly: 1) build a community of contributors that created high-quality content, 2) become the definitive place to link to for the topics they covered, 3) rank highly in organic search results. This led to a virtuous cycle where SEO drew more users, leading to more contributors and more inbound links, leading to more SEO, and so on. From roughly 2001-2008, SEO was the most effective marketing channel for high-quality informational sites.

In Sunday’s column by Washington Post ombudsman Andrew Alexander, the increase in typos and other copy editing errors stood trial. Angry letters have started coming more frequently, wondering, “If they don’t care about basics… how much do they care about factual accuracy?” Alexander served up the standard answer: our staffs have shrunk! But he also had a bizarre new scapegoat; namely, search engine optimization. Huh?