One of the most read SEO voices of the last 20 years posted something unexpected last week, and the community is still reacting.
Rand Fishkin published a LinkedIn post that he described as a post he almost never writes and began by saying he felt it was necessary. His core argument: ignore traffic. Create unique products. Shift your priorities away from great content on your own website and towards great marketing on the platforms your audience pays attention to.
Reddit at https://www.reddit.com/r/SEO/ There is an entire thread dedicated to this post. Reactions range from complete agreement to strong disagreement, with the most nuanced responses indicating that the advice applies differently depending on the business model.
If you make money through affiliate links or display ads, traffic is your product. If you sell something else, traffic is just a means to an end.
The underlying argument
SEO news in June 2026 points to a truth that many founders reject: Search is no longer a neat list of blue links, and teams that still treat SEO as a blog-only checklist are already late to the game. Small teams can still win. Start with money pages, fix crawling and indexing issues, update pages that are already getting impressions, and form tight topic clusters instead of publishing random blog posts.
Fishkin’s argument is not that SEO is dead. If you’re optimizing for traffic rather than results, you’re playing the wrong game because the rules change.
On X around https://x.com/search?q=Rand+Fishkin+content+traffic+2026 the discussion is ongoing. Several SEO experts fight back with data showing that well-executed content strategies still generate strong organic revenue. Others agree that the marginal return on general information content is rapidly declining.
The Quora thread at https://www.quora.com/Is-blogging-still-worth-it-in-2026 captures both sides of this argument using concrete examples. Worth reading before deciding whether to shift your content budget to platform-native content or double the budget for your own website.
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