Danny Sullivan says, “What helped turn BuzzFeed into a site that is the poster child for riding social media into massive popularity and traffic? Ironically, search goliath Google. Early on in BuzzFeed’s history, getting mistakenly hit by a Google penalty caused BuzzFeed to focus on social — a decision that’s been phenomenally successful for the media company.

BuzzFeed founder and CEO Jonah Peretti relayed the story when I talked with him last week on stage at our SMX conference in New York.

The Google Penalty That Paid Off

Soon after Peretti had turned his attention to BuzzFeed full-time in 2011, after leaving the Huffington Post, BuzzFeed took a hit from Google. The site had been trying to focus on building traffic from both social media marketing and through SEO.  But the SEO traffic — the free traffic driven from Google’s search results — dried up”.

How A Google Mistake That Killed BuzzFeed’s Traffic Turned It Into A Social Media Powerhouse

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