Anyone know Dennis Goedegebuure?

DrCool · January 13, 2015, 06:20:15 PM

Does anyone know Dennis? He is Dutch, was head of SEO at AirBNB, was at Ebay before that.

Our company just hired him to head up our SEO department. Just wanted to see if anyone here knows him or has worked with him in the past. I only chatted with him for a minute so wasn't able to find out too much about him.

JasonD · January 13, 2015, 07:49:37 PM

I don't sorry. The SEO world in the Netherlands is quite small though - Do you want me to ask around? I'm sure Yoast will know him.

Looking at his LinkedIn he seems to have learned on the job and had quite a few years at Ebay, working up the ranks before diving over to AirBNB

https://www linkedin com/in/dennisgoedegebuure

DrCool · January 13, 2015, 07:55:02 PM

Yeah, he mentioned Yoast as someone he knows. Our CMO and my VP know him from their time together at Ebay. It looks like he has spoken at a number of SEO conferences over the years too. Trying to figure out who I can namedrop to him and if our paths have crossed in the past.

JasonD · January 13, 2015, 08:01:14 PM

Looking at the recommendations he has, the 2 guys I know are Bruce Clay and Chris Winfield.

I'm sure he'd know Greg Boser as well and likely a few of the other "conference guys" like Danny Sullivan etc.

Adam C · January 14, 2015, 12:15:21 PM

don't know him personally, but have been aware of him over the past year or so. Read some interesting things on his blog about his ebay time / comparisons with Amazon.

Rumbas · January 14, 2015, 03:14:58 PM

Maybe Damian knows him?

IrishWonder · January 30, 2015, 01:26:53 AM

Ask Dave Naylor, they both go to SEOktoberfest

Adam C · June 23, 2016, 12:20:01 PM

Sorry to drag up an old thread, but had a reminder about this guy this morning when a colleague shared this post with me...

http://thenextcorner.net/technical-seo/

a very interesting read written in response to a shoddy piece on SEL that came out a week or 2 back - http://searchengineland.com/technical-seo-makeup-250408

Rumbas · June 23, 2016, 01:18:54 PM

Just came here to post the same Adam..

littleman · June 23, 2016, 05:05:51 PM

On the articles...
I just read both the search engine land article and his response. The makeup analogy is stupid, but I think Griffin does have a point in that content and site popularity does matter. If a company has a perfectly set up site, but no link popularity and no compelling reason/effort to grow a user base than it is like having car without an engine.

Doc, do you still work with Dennis?

DrCool · June 23, 2016, 05:11:58 PM

Quote from: littleman on June 23, 2016, 05:05:51 PM
Doc, do you still work with Dennis?

Yep, he still works at Fanatics. He is out in our bay area offices so I rarely see him.

Adam C · June 23, 2016, 07:37:47 PM

Quote from: littleman on June 23, 2016, 05:05:51 PM
On the articles...
I just read both the search engine land article and his response. The makeup analogy is stupid, but I think Griffin does have a point in that content and site popularity does matter. If a company has a perfectly set up site, but no link popularity and no compelling reason/effort to grow a user base than it is like having car without an engine.

Equally, there's a hypothetical point where extra links won't help you grow if you don't have your technical product together.

In all fairness, he's leading on the message that technical SEO can't be a differentiator which is simply wrong.

This sentence.... "You can use it to make your site more attractive to search engines, but at some point there's nothing more to be done."

In the last 15+ years of focusing on SEO - largely on-site, technical SEO - agency-side, inhouse and independent publisher - I've never reached that point.

Rumbas · June 24, 2016, 09:30:48 AM

>In the last 15+ years of focusing on SEO - largely on-site, technical SEO - agency-side, inhouse and independent publisher - I've never reached that point.

Absolutely true and my exact experience also.

ergophobe · June 24, 2016, 03:05:47 PM

>>never reached that point

And you guys are some of the best in the business.

Down at my more journeyman end of the scale... I have never audited a site where I didn't find at least one technical issue in the first... I'll say 30 mins, but I'd guess the number is lower than that. I think it would take Jason more like 30 seconds to find a problem on these sites.

Granted, I have never worked on sites that have been combed over by top technical SEO teams, but I have worked on sites that have millions and millions of dollars in revenue and years of agency consulting behind them and still find the most basic of technical SEO issues.

Again, down at my end of the scale, I see many sites that have purchased expensive agency SEO services for years, where nobody on the SEO team has ever seen a raw server log. They depend utterly on GA. When I requested raw logs, I was told they weren't sure how to get them and nobody had ever asked for them before.

You guys are the cream... but when you get lower down, it seems that's how SEO is mostly practiced in my limited experience. But damn have they had their meta keywords audited!