Most Common SEO Myths

From the author of the SEO bible, SEO Book, Aaron Wall, a complete online seo training course.

I hear so much talk about SEO myths lately that I decided to blog about this topic and write about those techniques and words which have proven to be seo myths during my SEO experiments. However, if any of the points I will blog about on this post is not convincing you, or you have other facts to contradict them please do not hesitate to comment.

Said this, I can now continue making the list of some common SEO myths and give explanation for each point why it is not as you have heard about it so far.

Duplicate Content Penalization

Let’s get this cleared straight up. Google will NOT penalize you for duplicate content in exception if the original author will not send a copyright infrigement notice to Google Inc. in that case the URL where the copyrighted content is located will be removed from Google’s index.

Lets take another scenario, on-site duplicate content. This is very common for wordpress users to have the same content located on several parts of the blog, even for that I have blogged awhile ago on how to remove duplicate content from your wordpress blog. The main reason why you would not want to have the same content located on several parts of your site is one: give more weight to the post page as that is the place where you would want visitors to land and have their information right in front of their nose.

Submitting your site on web directories is not good

Says who? It is true tho that web directories had a rough time with Google not long ago but having your website listed in a web directory will certainly not harm your site in the SERPs. What may really harm your site is links from bad neighborhood sites. There are several quality directories out there like the V7N Directory or the Botw directory on which you might consider to submit your site(s) at.

Advertising through AdWords will help in your rankings

A complete nonsense. AdWords is the advertising section of Google Inc, and the AdWords advertisers are published on their sister section which is AdSense through a javascript. Since we know that search engine spider bots are unable to read javascript then that myth dies right away.

Repeat your keywords to rank higher

Not only that this is a myth, but over repeating or also known as keyword stuffing will actually get you in trouble and possibly your site will be penalized. There is quiet a difference between “optimization” and “over optimization”, keyword stuffing is what we would call “over optimization” and it is harmful and not helpful.

XML Sitemap is not worth

You are going in Egypt, but you don’t have a touristic guide to show you the most marvelous places. Will you manage to see all the beauties of Egypt for the time you stay there? Maybe yes, but definitively with a tourist guider you will see more beautiful places then doing the research by yourself. This same happens with search engine, providing a “guide” through your site to the search engine spider bots will make it much easier for the spider to crawl all your content and find something. It is not that the search engine spider bots are unable to crawl your site, but with a XML sitemap not only that the spider bots will know the road to walk but they also get reminded that there is something new in your site that should be crawled.

PageRank is worthless

Worthless for…? If it’s intention is to mean that pagerank will not help in your search engine rankings then yeah that could be true…some how. However since PageRank is Google’s tool to determine the popularity of a site (where the popularity is calculated by the number of the backlinks a site receives from other popular/trustworthy sites) then it is closely connected with the fact how your site performs in the search engines (but not for specific keywords, as search engine rankings depends on the anchor that is used on those backlinks).

Don’t touch your site if its ranking

Not true at all, you can touch your site as much as you can if you know what you are doing (i.e. maintain the same keyword density, give value to those keywords for which you are ranking and of course, never stop to build backlinks to your site). Not touching your site at all, especially stopping to build quality backlinks, will give more space and time to your competitor to beat you on the SERPs.

The moral of myths

They will always remain as such unless you take your time, courage and determination to run experiments by yourself. Experimenting, learning during the seo experiment with your site and testing over techniques is the only way to really learn search engine optimization.

If you have anything to add to this post, please feel free to comment. If this article was informative for you and you would like to read more useful articles then subscribe to my RSS feed or have the posts delivered via email in your inbox.

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