[rchaud]

I worked in SEO for a long time. Google (and really Bing and everybody else) do not care anymore about organic SEO. Look at the average SERP. You could rank #1 for organic search results and your link would still be near the bottom of the page buried beneath sponsored results, thumbnails of Youtube video results, and "people also asked" blocks of links.

Remember when SEO 101 involved having a site that's primarily easy for search bots to crawl? Today, that doesn't cause your site to rank better, but it does make it easy for Google to scrape your site's content to show as an "Instant Answer".

It's pay to play if you want your site to rank on search these days.