Erstwhile Google Webmaster Central product manager Vanessa Fox reached back six months to discuss a perception about her famed former employer and search optimization.

These days we usually find Vanessa Fox posting at Search Engine Land or causing trouble for Rand Fishkin. She stepped back in time a little to address a chat-worthy post by Alex Bosworth, and his complaints about Google and SEO.

"I do think it’s still the case that many people don’t think of SEO as part of marketing," Fox said in describing why it got her attention. "They think of it as a necessary evil rather than part of a larger strategy."

"If you want a huge amount of traffic, the way to get it is not through community features, it is not through great writing and content development, but it is through optimizing the crap out of your site so that Google will send more and more searchers your way," Bosworth complained. That missed the point, according to Fox:

Yes, most people on the internet find sites through searching. So, yes, you can get a lot of traffic if you rank highly for relevant keywords. But traffic alone is meaningless. You have to look at traffic + engagement. Traffic + bounce rate. Unless your entire goal with the site is to monetize through CPM-based ads on the home page, your site needs to be compelling to the searchers who land there so that they’ll stay.

In other words, if you abandon great writing and content development, if you neglect the question of how to make the site better to use, you are simply being short-sighted and are ignoring all the rules of marketing. That’s not Google’s fault. That’s your own fault for not looking at the right metrics.

As far as complaining is concerned, Fox expressed some confusion over just what had Bosworth so upset:

“And your user community might even die, but who cares, comparatively they are a tiny minority of your overall user base. You’re too busy dealing with scaling your servers to cope with the millions of hits coming from Google to care about those ten thousand monthly visits from loyal users.”

He’s complaining that Google is sending him too much traffic and thus it’s somehow Google’s fault that he’s chosen to ignore audience engagement? It’s completely baffling to me.

Search optimization can help people find their targeted audience. But site publishers should worry more about the quality of what they have to offer their visitors, in Fox's opinion.

"You wouldn’t open your paint store with no sign and a broken door in a back alley that had a brick wall blocking the road. Why would you do the same on the internet and then blame Google?" she said.