nthidea : blog : SEO – SEM – Marketing – Cool News

In a recent PC Magazine article, John C. Dvorak started to rant about SEO and how useless it is.  After taking the advice from an SEO, he switched his URL structure to the descriptive, longer URL structure and comes up with the following decision:

Search engine optimization (SEO) has turned into a big business, and from what I can tell it’s the modern version of snake oil. The unproven nonsense spewed by so-called “SEO experts” simply doesn’t work. And worse, it’s screwing up the elegance of the Web.

….

With the new long URL you get the date and the headline of the post. In some instances with a long headline it’s ridiculous. Besides, the second URL is cumbersome, long-winded, and impossible to type by hand. It is supposed to be search-engine friendly and more likely to get the attention of Google. Check out the fact that 90 percent of the blogs and major Web sites all use this supposed trick to get attention.

It does nothing.

…..

So why is everyone doing it, and why does everyone think it works? I have stat packages on the blog and a million page views per month. I have enough traffic to see a difference when there is one. I had a run rate closing in on 1.2 million page views per month when I turned on this supposed SEO trick. Boom! I dropped to 900,000 instantly. It’s taken my site months to recover.

So basically, he has gone and sitewide, changed the forward facing address to the world, but he didn’t bother to let the post office know that he had changed his address, so now as far as they concerned, the cul-de-sac where he’s lived for some time now is under new occupancy, and he can’t figure out why he’s not getting mail!

What he didn’t do among other things, is 301 old links to pages with their current naming – at least so that any link instead of getting a 404, gets resolved to your home page…

Anyhow, most anyone that has been doing SEO for a while realizes how important URL naming along with the Page Title. Mr Dvorak may think its a stupid thing, but that doesn’t make it true, just proves how he’s quick to bash what he doesnt understand. Maybe that’s just his Shtick, though. Power to him. I can always  close I-tunes when I see he’s on Leo Laporte’s show from now on…

Tags: Add new tag, Big Ol' Idiot, friendly URLs, Google, John C. Dvorak, SEO / Search Engine Marketing, TWIT

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 12th, 2009 at 11:53 pm and is filed under SEO / Search Engine Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.