Chozo, 2 years ago

Good content will still be surfaced on its own

Will it, though? This all seems like untested theory, to be honest.

While SEO may have started as a means of manipulating search engines, search engines have grown to adopt to new SEO techniques and now use those techniques as part of their built-in ranking systems. Outside of content that goes truly "viral", I think it's pretty difficult to get anything new to the top of a Google search without some massive SEO these days. Especially considering the head start that bigger players have already gotten on their SEO game, and the sheer wealth of content that search engines have to parse through.

I think maybe if we were still in 2010's internet, that could be true. But search engines aren't the same as they were in the past. SEO is the new norm.