SEO, John Dvorak, etc

Posted by Tom Blue on February 10, 2009 under Companies, Marketing, Sales, Technology | Read the First Comment

John Dvorak just wrote a post about search engine optimization and how there is a lot of b.s. involved. For those of you who aren’t familiar with John Dvorak, he is the equivalent of Andy Rooney for the tech world. He is admittedly cranky and can be a bit of a curmudgeon. I actually find him humorous.

Anyhow, he mentions that many SEO pros told him to change his url format of his pages because they are more likely to get crawled by the search engines and are more likely to improve his rankings. The rumor/theory is that A) google doesn’t like parameters and ids inside web pages, and B) google also likes pages that have the keywords/titles inside of them. This backfired for Dvorak. He lost 20% of his traffic and it has taken him months to recover. I feel bad for him because I know that is frustrating, but I had the opposite experience when I switched over our page formats for Lead411. It has completely improved our results and we have grown by at least 60% since the change.

I do agree with Dvorak on one thing… seo is the new snake oil industry. I started noticing this in the nineties when everyone was starting their own SEO business. The problem is that payment is not based on results and probably never can be. SEO’s are at the mercy of google. I don’t know of any SEO professionals that guarantee certain rankings in google. If they did, they would be gambling. You never know what Google is going to do or what your competitors might do.

As for using a SEO firm… they are not all bad. I would just stick with the firms that show up at the top of the list for “SEO” in Google. I always love it when I get a marketing email from a SEO stating they can get me at the top of the results for my keywords. I immediately do a search for SEO or search engine optimization inside Google. 9,999 out of 1,000 their own URLs are not listed in the top 100. Hilarious.