> He isn't saying SEO doesn't matter, he's saying that pursuing SEO as a marketing strategy means you have to be very aggressive in order to get any traffic
SO got very significant search traffic with little apparent effort (that may be too harsh, but they were certainly not very aggressive).
It's probably fairer to say that Joel solved the chicken-egg problem by leveraging his existing community and fanning antipathy against experts-exchange. If the model was primarily SEO I'd expect them to have an easier time bootstrapping their non-tech related communities, especially now that they're investment-backed and can put money into user acquisition:
SO got very significant search traffic with little apparent effort (that may be too harsh, but they were certainly not very aggressive).
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/02/the-elephant-in-the...
This was before they made updates to deal with people out working them and at the time they were getting 83% of all their traffic from Google.