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.

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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.

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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…

Overall here’s a great primer on what Pagerank is and how it works…

Thanks to SEOmoz on this great post and of course for the option to embed and share their content…

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday-What’s PageRank Got to do With It? from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

A few interesting points.

1. Google can, in fact read dynamic URLs, and if you believe this post wholly, probably better than you may have thought previously.

2. Google says limiting to 3 parameters is unneccesary and maybe even harmful to indexing attempts. Personally, I think there may still be times this can be smart to do, but it seems like you probably have to think about it a bit more to get it right in some cases…

Google wants you to let the ENGINE decide what is important and what isn’t. Their actual recommendation is to NOT rewrite the URL. That’s great, so long as the engine knows whats on your mind for importance on a page… I’m still willing to bet a smart SEO is better off figuring this out himself and holding the engine’s hand still for a while longer…

Google did provide a few guidelines to think about:

1. It’s quite hard to correctly create and maintain rewrites that change dynamic URLs to static-looking URLs.
2. It’s much safer to serve us the original dynamic URL and let us handle the problem of detecting and avoiding problematic parameters.
3. If you want to rewrite your URL, please remove unnecessary parameters while maintaining a dynamic-looking URL.
4. If you want to serve a static URL instead of a dynamic URL you should create a static equivalent of your content.