I didn’t know about the question you asked about SE’s existence, was it an old Spam-Whackers post?

Of course Search Engine’s do exist, and it’s always nice to receive traffic from them, but what I’m discussing in the article here is from a purely marketing standpoint. The list of alternatives I made was just off the top of my head, I know there’s more methods that could be added to it.

I think you were mostly right about the point I was making. Users are the people who actually look for information, and come back for more if it was that good. Search Engines don’t provide a useful long-term traffic plan IMO (as they could take away hundreds or thousands of readers with only a slight modification to the algorithm, plus all the SEM would have been for nothing).

I wonder though, what other “tactics” would most webmasters use that cause them to get banned from the SE’s? (If the Engines didn’t exist, that is.)

The levels of spam (splogs, content scraping, etc.) would probably drop dramatically too if they weren’t around; and marketing wannabes would resort to more primitive tactics to advertise, like email and community spamming.

I asked a question a year or so ago about what you would do if SEs did not exist.

Since I know you fairly well I think I understand where your coming from.

The truth is if SEs did not exist all of us would be doing things that could possibly get us banned today to get traffic.

SEs do exist. So webmasters have to take that into consideration.

I think the point of your article is that web masters should concentrate on user experience. I think your right.