All too often I come across SEO skeptics, people with different backgrounds that believe that improving search engine rankings is a scam created by online hacks to try to make a buck. Some are even online savvy people that just don’t want to believe that there may be something to be gained from following an SEO strategy. A recent article in PC Magazine sent to me by a friend is a prime example of such skepticism:
Mr. John C. Dvorak’s article is the all-too-familiar case of “I got bad SEO advice, the SEO industry sucks.”
I was recently explaining to a colleague that I always welcome discussions with SEO skeptics and naysayers. After all, every point of contact we have with a potential client, existing client, or skeptic it an opportunity to remind them why our company exists and grows. I frequently get emailed articles decrying the merits of SEO and usually I just enjoy the read, learn from the writer and invariably laugh at some of the bad advice. This article however is something I feel compelled to respond to.
In the article, Dvorak concludes that SEO companies are snake oil salesman and the SEO industry is seemingly built on fraud. Let me take this opportunity to help Mr. Dvorak (and other potential skeptics) better understand the benefits of quality search engine optimization and where he may have missed the mark on his assessments.
In the world of high quality, ethical SEO, there are no silver bullets, just many silver bee bees. There's no one magic trick that will rocket your site's rankings and sales. A quality SEO company will layout year-long search engine strategies, and those strategies will take time and resources to implement. These strategies will not only include proper blog implementation but also a robust back-linking strategy that caters to Google’s evaluation methods (more on How Google works in a future post).
Mr. Dvorak bases his SEO opinions on strategies he implemented on his WordPress blog located at:
In the article, Mr. Dvorak sites two different tactics he tried on his blog that failed to increase his site traffic. The first was related to URL structure. He explains that he setup his blog and upon advice from a SEO Maven (his words not mine), changed the configuration of his permalink structure to use static links that contain the date and title of the post, instead of the dynamic default link structure. He also cited his experience with using “tags” inside his blog, and how none of this helped his traffic. In fact, after he adjusted the link structure, his traffic declined.
Let me address each of these tactics.
“Long” URLS
Mr. Dvorak cites that “long” URLs are bogus.
In my opinion, the standard custom URLs from WordPress are not as SEO-friendly as they could be. In my recent post SEO 101 for your WordPress site - In 7 easy steps, item #7 explains a good custom URL structure to use. If you opt to use the basic WordPress static link structure which puts values for year and month into your URL, you are slightly devaluing each post.
Why?
When the search engines see the the URL structure:
http://www.dvorak.org/blog/2009/02/12/los-alamos-labs-69-computers-missing/
Search Engines think...
1.) There is a website called dvorak.org
2.) Four folders deep in dvorak.org, there is content
3.) That content is about “Los Alamos labs 69 computers missing”
4.) Because the content is in a deeper folder, it's not as important
Google prioritizes content based on folder level. As any quality SEO Maven will tell you, it's a bad idea to place content unnecessarily deep within your website. The ideal place for the content is a page in your root, or one to two folders deep and unless it's absolutely necessary avoid anything deeper than three. By having a blog within a folder of your site, you're already placing content one folder deeper.
A better structure for the dvorak.org blog would be:
http://www.dvorak.org/blog/los-alamos-labs-69-computers-missing/
The original link structure without the custom permalinks setup would not have been de-valued as much because it was fewer folders deep:
http://www.dvorak.org/blog/?p=3100
However, Google does use pertinent keywords from your URLs to better understand the content to expect within the web page. Hence, the benefit of having the title in the URL.
Another factor to consider is that when you make a major change to your site (i.e. URL structure changes), your web pages typically drop in rankings because, from what we can tell, Google is re-evaluating your web pages during this time. And when done correctly, the web pages that dropped come back within 30-60 days to a position higher than they were before. This, and not the URL structure, is more likely to blame for the temporary drop in traffic to Dvorak’s site.
Tags
Mr. Dvorak goes on to talk about tags and their use in his WordPress site. He compares tagging to the use of meta-descriptions tags (descriptive text embedded within your page infrastructure). These two types of tags actually serve very different purposes. There similarity ends with having close sounding names.
If you do a Google search, what descriptions do you think Google is displaying in the results? Are they using the linked tags on the web page? No, they are using the meta-description tags. The meta-description tags are used by Google for any page that has them. Tags used in blog software like WordPress are simple ways to improve the users experience with your site by giving them a quick understanding of the topics you write about.
Mr. Dvorak explained that he tested the strength of tags in his WordPress posts and found no improved rankings. In no way is that surprising. Any SEO (person or company) worth their salt understands that tags should be used for improving the users experience and not search engines rankings.
So we are in agreement, that tagging won't help your website rankings. That's in no way proof that the SEO industry is a scam.
Making statements like “SEO is a big business, and from what I can tell its proponents are modern snake-oil salesmen” is only a prompt for criticism by others with proven track records. Face the facts, you got bad advice. Criticism towards the SEO industry as a whole only adds to the countless amount of SEO misinformation that is floating around drummed up by people who don’t spend their time really figuring it out. I would recommend to those of you that really want to improve your blog or site’s visibility and gain sustainable traffic to subscribe to the Scrappy Marketing blog and take some of the advice you get.
Ben Herman is the owner of Mad Fish SEO in Portland, Oregon.
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I think you make some great points here - I too have heard a surprising amount of SEO criticisms lately. While it's rather ignorant to dismiss SEO outright I think that bad SEO advice happens far too often so I can understand his frustration!
Can you justify the whole forward slashes in your url causes Google to think the page is less valuable due to "folder level" because this is the first I have ever heard of this.
From all other sources of information I've found regarding a page's Google Pagerank the only think that really matters is the quality and relevance of incoming links and nothing to do with the characters in your page's URL.
Hi Beau,
Good question. Google's algorithm, known as PageRank, does have a lot to do with quality of incoming links but that factor alone does not improve the site’s rankings. When discussing Google PageRank, we are actually discussing over 450 factors that contribute to it.
One of those factors is the rate at which a page is spidered. From what we can tell, while a page will get spidered regardless of the folder depth, that page will not be spidered as often if it is nestled 4 or five folders deep in a site. In larger websites it can take a longer period of time before the spiders return to cache new or updated pages. In order to make things easier for the spiders, it's best to keep a URL structure simple and organized in high-level folders where possible to insure timely review by the search engines’ crawlers.
Regarding the characters in the URL, Searchengineland.com has a good article on this. The article explains that while search engines can read dynamic URLS, not optimizing the keywords in the URL is like leaving potential SEO benefit and better click-through rates from Google searchers on the table.
http://searchengineland.com/...-maximum-seo-impact-14006
My point is really that marketers should utilize every little factor available to build their site’s rankings and traffic.
Thanks,
-Ben