Dvorak

The last week in the virtual world was marked with extreme intensity of emotions. A cutting remark of a famous journalist made SEO-specialists defend their profession. The case is as following: one of reputable IT columnists, John Dvorak, the writer of several IT magazines and the author of the blog with a million audience, has published a squelcher in PCMagazine.

Right from the very beginning John states that all SEO specialists are no other than ordinary jugglers. They offer nonsense, which never works and they spoil elegant web ? these were main claims of the columnist in his article. He made such conclusions after a recent experience with one of his friends, specialized in SEO, who recommended him to rewrite blog urls, making them longer and thus more attractive for search engines.

Initially, John used URLs of the following type: www.dvorak.org/blog/?p=3100. Following his friend?s recommendations he changed them for longer ones: www.dvorak.org/blog/2005/10/20/hollywood-unions-want-cut-of-itunes-pie/. A journalist aired his grievances for seeing his URLs awkward, ugly and difficult for typing into the browser address bar. That is to say, John is absolutely unfamiliar to copy and paste functions for typing in the URL into the address bar.

As John states, after changing page addresses, he lost 300 000 visitors of his 1.2 mln. And then he decided to change all of them back and prove that SEO is worth nothing and optimizers are just cheating their clients.

Such high words in combination with, to put it mildly, such a shallow analysis could not escape rising active response from SEO professionals. The SEO-president of Vision Interactive, Mark Jackson, a member of several Internet marketing associations, accused John Dvorak of being ignorant. Having admitted that a lot of fakes, incompetent even is writing quality titles, have appeared recently, Mark, however, expressed his offense on behalf of true optimization professionals, who spent years for studying the best methods and techniques.

In response to criticism of a dissatisfied blogger, Mark Jackson gave few rules for optimizing web page URLs

1. To use keywords in web page address.
2. Not to place content into folders located far from the main domain to avoid multi-levels.
3. Not to forget to set 301 redirect from the old posts to new addresses.
4. The question whether to put words in URL with hyphen or underline is still not resolved. Both methods have their fans.

Mark noted that it is not necessary to remove dynamic symbols from URLs - now search engines handle such addresses. The main mistake of blogger's bad fair was to hide posts behind five slashes, i.e. place them far from the main blog domain. Besides, it's not necessary to use date in web page address.

Arguments against John Dvorak in another professional blog, SEObook, can be summarized as following: SEO can't be ineffective and can't be a scam, because Matt Katz spends his time attending specialized conferences, Yahoo! is licensing automatic optimization services, SEO-professionals' blogs do not lose popularity and the profit of Internet marketing companies grows.

The most astonishing about it is that an offended blogger started accusing optimizers of being unprofessional after using only one free advice of one single optimizer. Moreover, this advice was not only incorrect, but also incomplete. SEO does not mean site pages correction only, it also includes correctly written content with keywords included, working out titles and headers and working over internal and external links.

That?s why one person, let him be extremely popular, can make a fuss as much as he wishes. Anyways, professionals will see that noisy insults contain a very little sense, and companies won't stop hiring professionals unless they bring them clients.