[brudgers]

"You can be successful with your product on the WWW without employing any Google services"

It is often more difficult to be successful on the internet without devoting significant resources to Google specific SEO. Doing so without the benefit of Google search would be orders of magnitude more difficult, and Google is under no obligation to return any particular website in their results (e.g. Safe Search).

Google is a company just like any other, only, perhaps, more so.

[tferris]

I don't agree.

If you build a really great web based product you don't need to do any single SEO activity to get strong traffic. No white or black hat or anything needed. People will come anyway.

It's all about the product. If it's good people will tell and Google will notice. And Google is so smart that every crappy site powered by 100,000 system generated backlinks blasts will stay inferior.

[brudgers]

>"If you build a really great web based product"

Assuming a really great web based product begs the question a bit. It's a pretty select group.

[zerostar07]

Twitter, facebook, airbnb didn't do any SEO

[brudgers]

JustinTV, Scribd, and Carwoo are more typical new companies.

Ebay and Amazon are more typical of large consumer facing companies.

Facebook does a great deal of SEO - it's how they compete with Linkedin for eyeballs.