John Dvorak Bashes SEO
For those of you who don’t have techmeme set as their homepage you may have missed a story that popped up recently where PC Magazine columnist John Dvorak dismissed SEO as ‘modern snake-oil salesmen‘. What was the basis for this allegation? Essentially John switched his blog over from standard URL structure to more search engine friendly URLs. This is common practice when it comes to SEO and Google’s engineers have even publicly stated that “Use user-friendly URLs like african-elephants.html, and not 343432ffsdfsdfdfasffgddddd.html” are better for search engines in deriving the meaning of the article from. So when John did his test he reported the results as:
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. I think it’s because these long URLs are just crap and stupid.
Ahh such a scientific test. John didn’t bother to specify if he addressed questions such as:
- Historically does X month have more/less traffic than Y month?
- What was the cause of the drop in traffic? Less organic traffic?
- Were there specific keywords that resulted in the drop in traffic?
- Did he blog less? Were the posts just not as popular?
- Did average page views per visit drop or just overall page views?
- Were there any technical problems as to cause a drop in traffic?
- Did he not make any other changes to the blog?
- Were his URLs renamed and did he 301 redirect them?
The answer to these questions is that John probably didn’t look into any of them. He thought that he would make an attempt to be funny, and rip into SEO as if he understood. When a supposedly reputable news source such as PC Magazine allows their writers to bash an industry that for the most part offers transparency into techniques, pricing, and results it just shows how out of touch they are. With people holding onto their computers longer there is only so much that they can talk about with regards to Windows 7 so they get into topics in which they are ill prepared and don’t research. On the plus side for them this article has generated a lot of buzz. Could John Dvorak be smart enough to create a controversial link bait piece of content to generate page views for PC Magazine? Nah.
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