Why John Dvorak is dead wrong about SEO
February 15th, 2009 by Jim KellerI’d like to start this article by stating that I have nothing against John Dvorak, but I was surprised to see PC Magazine run his editorial, “SEO Fiascoes: The Trouble with Search Engine Optimization“, because of its striking ignorance with regard to search engine optimization. I’m going to break down the article and explain why it’s simply way off base. Sorry John!
“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.”
John is right in pointing out that many SEO companies are in fact selling “snake oil”. Oftentimes, SEO firms claim to have an advanced knowledge of the optimization process when actually they are just exploiting the fact that most customers have little or no understanding of SEO, so they don’t know the right questions to ask or what kinds of results to expect. However, saying that SEO “simply doesn’t work” just because some companies provide poor SEO service is equivalent to saying that because a 1985 Yugo is a bad car, it’s not worth owning a car at all. As for the “screwing up the elegance of the web”, I don’t think you can make a reasonable argument to support this statement. Proper SEO ensures that sites have standards-compliant code, CSS based navigation, logical information architecture, and useful content. All of those things enhance the web and increase elegance, so I’m not sure what John was getting at here.
( John then goes on to talk about how integrating verbose URLs – “/2008/02/14/this-is-a-blog-post.html” vs. “blog/?id=300″ – actually decreased site traffic on his blog. He describes verbose URLs as “crap and stupid“ )
It’s possible that implementing a new URL scheme did in fact hurt the traffic on John’s blog. Any changes to the URL scheme need to be planned and properly implemented, with 301 redirects being added to make sure that legacy links remain working. Additionally, it’s not impossible that John’s readers are, for some reason, less inclined to share a long link than a short one. However, John’s single isolated case provides no credible evidence for the argument that verbose URLs as a whole are detrimental to site traffic. He had no control metrics for the experiment, and doesn’t consider many other factors (maybe some old links were giving 404s after the change?) that may have affected his traffic. Finally, he seems to suggest that SEO relies very heavily on the URL architecture, because people he had spoken about SEO seemed to focus heavily on static vs. dynamic links. It’s true that when optimizing a site, the URL structure needs to be such that page content does not rely on dynamic variables passed via the URL, because those variables may not be present when a search engine crawler visits the page. However, URL structure is one very small part of the SEO process, but John doesn’t touch on the most important aspects of SEO.
This brings me to another SEO gambit, this one promoted by the “social media is everything” crowd in alliance with the “semantic Web is the future” dingbats. And this is the oh-so-important tag. Tags, stored as such, are the modern equivalent of the metatags once used on crude HTML pages. They don’t work and are a stupid exercise in futility. And if they ever do work it won’t be for long, because despite what idealists believe, Web site owners will attempt to cheat the system.
Here, John is arguing that “tagging” posts have no effect on traffic. Again, I’m not sure that any reasonable SEO firm will focus too heavily on tagging, but I’ll address the issue anyway. If nothing else, tags provide automatic generation of landing pages that focus on a specific, important content category for a site. In fact, one of the most common entry pages for this blog is the “SEO” tag page, found here: http://www.contextsolutions.net/blog/tag/seo/ . The tag page in this instance acts as a search-friendly sitemap for one area of a site, and it appears without any additional effort on the webmaster’s part.
I’d also like to point out that John describes “metatags” as being antiquated, and only in use on “crude HTML pages”. It is true that the meta “keywords” tag has much less significance than it once did, but an accurate, concise meta description tag (and a title tag) are still very important in describing content to search engines. The meta description tag is also the first place search engines look in order to provide a summary of the site content in the results list, so accurate, concise meta tags are still an important element of site structure.
Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying there’s nothing you can do to get more attention. Much of what you can control is structural. If you have a blog full of fancy AJAX code, it’s going to be difficult to index, for example. Making your Web site search-engine-friendly is one thing, in other words. But using stupid human tricks such as the long URL and tags to get more attention is folly-and bad advice, from what I can tell. Beware!
Here, John almost saves himself by mentioning that there are some truths to SEO, but it doesn’t nearly make up for the wild inaccuracies in the rest of the post. One of the biggest challenges faced by good SEO companies – and we are out here – is the “snake oil” that some SEO firms are selling. Clients may have had a bad experience with a bargain basement SEO, resulting in the opinion that the entire process is a scam (see my comparison to the Yugo above). John is only helping to perpetuate the notion that SEO is entirely undefined and useless, but the fact of the matter is that the right SEO company will provide measurable results via better positioning and increased conversions. The bottom line? SEO results can be calculated in dollars and cents if the right company is in the driver’s seat.
