The online magazine, The Atlantic, made a somewhat surprising statement that they no longer care about SEO. Some would argue The Atlantic was never that strong in the field of SEO to begin with, but they think they have hit on a way to get traffic without worrying about optimizing. In this theory, however, lays some flawed logic which harkens back to actually using SEO still, just in a slightly different way than they were before. See whether you agree with the assertion that The Atlantic’s giving up on SEO is actually nothing of the sort as several SEOs have gone vocal on.
The Atlantic is going with the idea that good writing is just good writing and people will find and share it. They point out that about 2/3 of their traffic comes from social networks so they are going to focus on that rather than SEO. They are giving up on keyword density or worrying about where they fall in thr Google news results. Here is the problem though – they get a lot of traffic from social networks because a lot of it is referred traffic from people that found the content on Google news feeds.
As one SEO put it, look at it this way. You see a great article on the Google feed, read it and share it to your networks. Maybe two people click that link to go to the article itself. Social networking does help, but someone has to find that content somewhere first in order to share it. Without those organic shares, there are no click through hits. So while The Atlantic may work on building up more followers, who can easily mute their feed, on social networks to spoon feed content to them, without Google traffic they will suffer. Sad as it is to say, if Google doesn’t tell the world content is good by featuring it in their feeds, the world doesn’t see it and SEOs are telling this to The Atlantic – they just aren’t listening.
Tags: magazine, SEO, the atlantic
