Site that completely ignores search engines

So how does a site that completely ignores search engines end up getting such a sizeable amount of traffic from them? The answer is simple. As the product gets really popular, other sites and especially blogs start to talk about them, even their success without the help of search engines. These articles get indexed by search engines and people link to them rapidly and push them right to the top of search engine results. And magically the site starts to enjoy enormous traffic from the very search engines they shunned in the first place.