SEO is the modern version of Snake Oil

Hmm, indeed, the modern version of snake oil, as reported by John C Dvorak over at PC Mag.

Mr Dvorak explains to us that human readable URL’s don’t give you any advantage, nor does he think that social media is all it’s cracked up to be and don’t get him started on tagging!

So, what’s the real empirical evidence here? I mean, I’ve naturally a vested interest in saying that SEO is more relevant today that it was 10 years ago, when keyword meta stuffing was the number secret (not!) to getting that page one listing. But is there any real evidence that says employing SEO techniques, on a consistent basis to your website, will actually result in your website getting more traffic or less traffic?

What evidence does Dvorak put forward?

He says,about using a human readable URL,…

“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.”

Ok, so you get the date and headline – useful, maybe, maybe not.

The human readable url is too long – do people actually type url’s anymore? Cut and paste surely…anyway I digress.

Is using human readable url’s good for you visibility? The article goes on to say that his website dropped from 1.2million page views per month to 900,000 and it took him months to recover.

So, what actually happened here? You have a URL http://www.dvorak.org/blog/?p=3100, and then change it to http://www.dvorak.org/blog/2005/10/20/hollywood-unions-want-cut-of-itunes-pie.

What is happening behind the scenes when you implement a site wide change like this?

The initial link that has been indexed is http://www.dvorak.org/blog/?p=3100, this is also the link that tons of people linked to, right? So, now the new URL is http://www.dvorak.org/blog/2005/10/20/hollywood-unions-want-cut-of-itunes-pie.

What happens if I follow the old link and there is no redirect setup? Bang! I get page not found. What happens when the search engine displays the old link and I click on it – Bang! Page not found.

Playing around with URL stings is not something to be taken lightly, as you have probably built up a lot of backlinks to pages within your website and the search engines have indexed all those links.

If you change your old link to new friendly human readable links you must ensure that you setup a site wide permanent 301 redirect that allows the search engines to re-index the new url’s over time and for people to be redirected to the new pages seemlessly.

You can also run a new sitemap.xml and upload it to Google Webmasters and let them know your new page structure.

The point is you have to tell the search engines that you have made the change.

I’ve no doubt that Mr. Dvorak’s traffic fell, but I don’t think it was because he was employing snake oil tactics – more like he didn’t realise the impact his changes would have – and that’s where you need your SEO Professional.

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