John Dvorak Has Sour Grapes
This post was made Feb 11, 2009 by Carlos del Rio
credit: Brett Buddin
John Dvorak, of PC Mag, put out an entertaining diatribe yesterday titled: SEO Fiascoes: The Trouble with Search Engine Optimization. In short Mr. Dvorak thinks that search engine optimization is fake because he can’t figure out how to do it and meta keyword tags don’t work on Google.
John Dvorak claims that he changed his permalink structure for his blog and his pageviews decreased by 25%. But, why did his pageviews really change? There are a number of factors that could be the problem. If you change your permalink structure you need to review your external links to make sure your most popular posts are resolving correctly in both your previous and new structure. Mr. Dvorak conveniently leaves out the number of visitors he had, and what channel they came through. Pageviews are an irrelevant metric for measuring a change that is intended to improve search ranking. Dvorak never mentions whether his search position changed, whether his 404′s increased, or the all important search referrals changed.
For all we know his lost page views are the result of improperly supporting the redirects to the new permalinks. If John Dvorak wants to make a real commentary on the efficiency or effect of SEO techniques he should do his due diligence of learning:
- The necessary support task for the technique he is applying
- The appropriate metrics for measuring the change
- The reasoning behind the change, not just mimicking an individual application.
Search engine optimization is not a trick, it is a process. In my last post: Why Your SEO Campaigns Fail: Tactics vs Strategy I brought up the fact that random application of any one technique will likely result in no value. Dvorak nails that point home. He clearly demonstrates that applying a single technique is not going to magically improve your results, he also shows why you should learn about analytics before talking about your results.
Michael Martinez wrote a comprehensive post on SEO Techniques today or my simpler White Hat SEO Techniques can get you started with some ideas. But, don’t choose one and rail against us– choose a couple that support each other.
He may actually get some long-term benefit if he leaves the change in place but I have to wonder if he is still “friends” with the SEO who gave him the bad advice.
Even in some sort of chat, the “SEO” should have mentioned 301-redirects or warned him about the dip in traffic.
Dvorak is part entertainer as much as anything else and his whining may be interesting to some of his readers. In the short run he drops some links but if he added all-in-one-seo and a decent permalink structure, in the long run he will get more relevance to each post he pumps out… and probably more traffic. Regards,
Yes, in the long run he probably would get better value from sticking with it.
I don’t think that all-in-one-seo is strictly necessary, but it is an easy shortcut.