SEO Still Remains A Viable Marketing Strategy For Anyone: A Hamsterdam History Lesson

By Ethan Lazuk

Welcome to another edition of Hamsterdam History!

This is a series of posts where we look at “vintage” SEO articles to celebrate their contributors, gain historical knowledge, and discuss how things have changed (or haven’t) since.

In this edition, we’re looking at a post by Danny Sullivan from March 6, 2011 called “SEO Remains A Viable Marketing Strategy For Anyone.”

I chose this article for two reasons: 1) it speaks to the “SEO is dead” mantra (back in 2011) and 2) it offers historical lessons itself.

“Don’t depend solely on SEO, but don’t neglect it, either.”

This is the gist of what Danny is writing about.

Let’s now go through each section of the article and compare its lessons with today.

“SEO Is Not The Only Way”

Danny first recounts words of his from a 1996 guide called “A Webmaster’s Guide To Search Engines”:

“Search engines are a primary way people look for web sites, but they are not the only way.

People also find sites through word-of-mouth, traditional advertising, the traditional media, newsgroup postings, web directories and links from other sites. Many times, these alternative forms are far more effective draws than are search engines. The audience you want may be visiting to a site that you can partner with, or reading a magazine that you’ve never informed of your site.

Do the simple things to best make your site relevant to search engines, then concentrate on the other areas.”

In short, search engines aren’t the only way that people find a website.

Of course, nowadays we have AI assistants pulling mentions and giving citations to websites, referring some traffic but more often generating brand awareness.

If Danny’s 1996 argument was to create great websites that people will find in many ways, including but not limited to search engines, then we must also think about how websites are used today: not just for user engagement but also as data sources for AI assistants.

In some senses, that changes the equation from create great websites for users overall to create great websites for users and machines — a slight evolution, arguably.

“The Cycle Of Overdependency”

“I’ve written several times about search engines being fickle creatures that no one should build a business around,” Danny writes in 2011.

His article includes screenshots from a 2003 presentation after the Florida update:

“The traffic that some sites have lost in the wake of Google’s Farmer Update (also called Panda) is not a new thing in general,” he writes in 2011. “Google has made major changes to its algorithm many times before that has caused some to lose traffic.”

The loss of traffic to algorithm updates isn’t new in 2026 either. Of course, nowadays we have more instances of Mount AI, where scaled content abuse led to dramatic drops in organic visibility.

But given the volatility that organic traffic can have — although I’d argue it’s limited by staying within search engine guidelines — it’s smart today not to over-depend on such traffic sources, just as it was in 2011 and prior.

“Is SEO Dead?”

Danny writes about “Google being praised in some quarters for its most recent update that’s designed to reward quality content” while mentioning that some declared SEO dead because of the predominance of “black hat SEO plus Google’s inadequacies.”

He’s critical of that claim, just as we should be today.

Those new to GEO who see it as a different discipline may make similar claims that SEO is no longer relevant, but that ignores the connection between SEO and GEO best practices.

“SEO Continues To Work For Big & Small”

Danny writes that SEO “should have been part of an overall marketing mix — not the primary marketing means,” speaking specifically of start-ups.

Earlier in the section, he notes how SEO can benefit brands of all sizes:

“The reality is that there are plenty of sites, big and small, start-up and well-established, that have done just fine with SEO. They gain a good chunk of visitors to their web sites because of SEO; they come through the various algorithm updates unscathed.”

I believe this is the case today.

A site needn’t be established to get the benefits of an SEO (combined with a GEO) strategy. That isn’t to say the two sizes of sites are equal: having established authority, especially third-party mentions, is an advantage. But for any new brand, you’d still want your information findable on the open web, and that’s where SEO/GEO can help.

“The Social Slice”

“One of the nice things over the years is that social has grown to rival search as a ‘free’ traffic source,” writes Danny.

That said, “the same risk applies — if you’re depending on social as your primary marketing channel, you’re depending on a medium over which you can’t directly control.”

I wouldn’t say social sites are the great traffic referrers they were in past years, given how they seem to suppress posts with external links today. Having said that, the connections between organic visibility and a social presence run deep.

My advice to any brand is to invest heavily in social media as part of your SEO/GEO strategy, both for the in-SERP features you can get as well as for the citations that social media can earn in AI assistants.

“Link Authority Is Dated, But Still”

Danny concedes that “Google has tended to reward older sites and has also still allowed link spamming to work.”

Google’s modern spam updates are aggressive against artificial links (but yes, such links can still work, if only temporarily). Although the focus today is less on links than on third-party mentions. Mentions can help establish the associations around a brand that both search engines and AI systems may encounter. This makes them a new currency of brand authority in the AI-assistant era.

“Good SEO & Good Content Works”

The fundamentals are still what wins, concludes Danny in 2011:

“Is your site accessible to search engines? Are you paying attention to your title tags? Are you thinking about the copy you write? And most of all — do you have good content?”

That’s no less true today.

Although today’s context for an accessible website also includes AI assistants, such as allowing them in robots.txt and not relying on CSR JavaScript.

As far as what “good content” means, we can look to another 2011 article by Vanessa Fox, called “Your Site’s Traffic Has Plummeted Since Google’s Farmer/Panda Update. Now What?,” for a contemporaneous definition:

“Creating a Tactical Plan From Google’s Advice

If we break down what Google’s saying, it’s that ways to avoid being negatively impacted by this (and other) changes are to have a site with:

• Original content and original research (not aggregated or syndicated from other sources)
• Authoritative information (deep and useful content, not simply words about a topic; content that answers people’s questions and that they find credible)
• Compelling added value (if the content isn’t unique, does the page add significant value over the original source?)
• Significant user engagement, including links and social sharing
• Valuable content across the entire site

Look at the pages of your site that are still doing well and the pages that now rank highly for the queries you no longer rank for. Are there patterns that match the bullets above? Certainly it will be the case that for some queries you may find that pages that you don’t feel provide value are ranking, but you should find some common elements in pages that are doing well.”

Original content and research, authoritative information, compelling added value, those are all characteristics of non-commodity, helpful content today.

Takeaways

If we look back to what people like Danny Sullivan and Vanessa Fox were writing for the SEO community in 2011, we can find that not much — beyond the circumstances of AI assistants — has changed today.

People were still calling SEO dead, and that wasn’t true. SEO has remained relevant, not simply because it can generate traffic, but because making information discoverable and understandable naturally feeds into new discovery systems, like AI assistants.

SEO is still valuable to sites of all sizes, but shouldn’t be the primary or only channel relied upon. A new brand can benefit from having its information made accessible on the open web, and can grow its authority over time.

Great technical SEO and content are what help a site’s visibility grow (and not be negatively affected by algorithm updates). Sites must ultimately be accessible to search engines and AI assistants, and promote their visibility through original, high-value content.

So the next time you hear a new GEO person claim that SEO is history and they have a quick win for you, remind them of this SEO history — SEO remains alive and well, and the only real shortcut is hard work.

Outro

I hope you’ve enjoyed this edition of Hamsterdam History!

Stay tuned for another edition soon, or check out related history articles below.

Until next time, enjoy the vibes:

Thanks for reading. Happy optimizing!

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