[itsprofitbaron]

how does TechCrunch have any Google rank then? How do most tech publications, for that matter?

TechCrunch does not post advertorials, they post content for free and they actually posted on their site to reaffirm this fact[1].

Sure there may be some PR firms etc who might get paid to get that content on to TechCrunch or another tech publications but TechCrunch writers are not directly compensated for doing so.

As a result the content they write from a startup launch to a new feature etc is considered "natural" by the search engines as they're choosing to write about it.

Moreover, those publications get the majority of their search engine traffic through being in Google News ala. posting about "Twitter" and getting inserted into the "Twitter" SERPs within the "News" section. Additionally they also leverage internal linking to boost their SERPs potential e.g. whenever they talk about Zulily (they're in #9 for me in Incognito mode although they might be higher/ on Page 2 for you) instead of linking to the site they'll reference the "Tag URL"[2] as well as referencing Crunchbase[3] (although CrunchBase isn't really 'internal' as its an external site). Likewise, Google loves "fresh content" so they will naturally be inserted with little/no links within the top 7ish results for something generic (although this does not always happen) such as "credit card numbers" when they do a post about "credit card numbers" and will naturally lose search engine positioning for that term over time.

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/08/we-are-worth-at-least-3k/

[2] http://techcrunch.com/tag/zulily/

[3] http://www.crunchbase.com/company/zulily