- Spending money on Google Adwords will improve your organic rankings
- Posting links in 30,000 forums and blog comments will help me rank
- You can sculpt pagerank using nofollow
- An SEO firm can have a ‘special relationship’ with a search engine
- Toolbar PageRank matters
- If I write great content, I’ll move up in the rankings
- META description and keyword tags affect rankings
- I can hide content on the page for better rankings
- Customers hate pages with text on them
- Search engines can index Flash, javascript and AJAX content
- Keyword-rich links at the bottom of pages help a lot
- More to come
One last thing to get out of the way before we move into the gritty, down-to-earth SEO stuff: SEO myths. Some get started because of an honest mistake. Others start because scam artists want you to think they’ve got all the answers. I want you to know myth from fact so that, even if you never do SEO on your own, you can always judge a good SEO consultant from a bad one.
My favorite (cough) myths:
Spending money on Google Adwords will improve your organic rankings
Uh-uh. Google is very careful to keep the software that delivers their pay per click ads – the ads on the right-hand side of most search results pages – completely separate from their unpaid, ‘organic’ search results.
Think about it. Search engines make money by delivering satisfying results. If they tampered with the rankings to get a few extra bucks here and there, they’d risk a lot more than they can gain. I’m not assuming search engines are ‘good’ or ‘bad’. I’m just assuming they have their own best interests at heart.
Posting links in 30,000 forums and blog comments will help me rank
This actually used to work, but not for long. Search engines don’t like looking dumb, remember. They use several methods to filter out these kinds of spammy links.
First, they ignore most of the votes from links that are marked ‘nofollow’. Don’t worry about the technical specifics of this – just realize that most blogs and forums automatically mark links ‘nofollow’.
Second, they check the location of links on the page. If links are down in the comments or among dozens of other links, guess what? They pass very little authority to your site.
Third, they check the value of the site on which you get the link. The better sites are pretty good at filtering out link spammers.
You can sculpt pagerank using nofollow
This one may be total gibberish to you right now. Just understand: You should never, ever use nofollow on internal site links to ‘sculpt’ pagerank. This was all the rage for a while, but in June of 2009 Google clarified their nofollow policy, and it’s all bad for onsite sculpting.
An SEO firm can have a ‘special relationship’ with a search engine
Every time I see an SEO claim this, I want to gag them. No search engine endorses SEO firms, ever. Until recently, most search engines looked at SEOs as slightly better than pond scum. They sure as hell won’t put their seal of approval on a search engine optimization firm.
Search engines do certify pay per click advertising firms. That’s a whole different game, and the fact that a firm is an approved PPC provider means nothing about their SEO skills.
Toolbar PageRank matters
The PageRank number displayed in the Google Toolbar (if you have it installed) is worthless. Tests I’ve done show you’ve got a better chance predicting a site’s ranking by guessing than by reading the Toolbar PageRank.
Real PageRank is a far more complex number, in a far greater range, than the simple 0-10 scale you see on the Toolbar.
If I write great content, I’ll move up in the rankings
Yeah, I wish. You’ll hear Google, Bing and Yahoo! repeat “Produce useful, great content and you’ll get links and you’ll rank better.”
Poppycock.
There are thousands, if not tens or hundreds of thousands, of other sites all competing with you for rankings and attention. You’re going to have to do a little more to be heard. That’s what SEO is for.
META description and keyword tags affect rankings
Not any more. Search engines completely ignore the keywords meta tag. They use the description meta tag to generate some search ‘snippets’ in the search results. But that’s it.
Again: Search engines ignore the keywords tag. Don’t believe me? Fine. Here’s what Google said. Yahoo! and Bing say the same.
The title tag is all that matters, when it comes to meta tags.
I can hide content on the page for better rankings
You can try. A lot of folks will try to put keyword-rich text in hidden DIVs or in the same color as the background, hoping search engines will find it and attribute it to their relevance. Actually the opposite is true: Search engines look for these tricks and ban sites for using them.
Customers hate pages with text on them
Designers hate putting real, HTML text on a page. They can’t control the appearance of real text as much as they’d like, so they push to use type in images and Flash as a substitute.
Just put the damned text on the page. Done right, a home page with real HTML text can be every bit as pleasing to the visitor, and you’ll get far more of those visitors.
Search engines can index Flash, javascript and AJAX content
Nope. Search engines are trying to index Flash. They’re making an effort to index javascript and AJAX content. But the results thus far are, at best, lousy. If you want your text found, it must be real text.
By ‘real’, I mean text you can cut-and-paste into a text editor. Text that’s in an image, a Flash file or a video doesn’t count.
Keyword-rich links at the bottom of pages help a lot
They barely help at all. Google, Bing and Yahoo! all apply the rational surfer model to link valuation. The less likely a reader is to click on a link, the less value the link can pass. And guess what? Readers don’t click those 8-point type links you shove at the bottom of the page.
More to come
I’ll keep updating this page as new myths show up. If you find a good one, leave it in the comments below.