I love SEO myths as they come from all places and tend to have a life of their own. What is really great when you hear a so called SEO expert actually quoting these myths as if they are good pieces of SEO information. Anyhow, lets look at some of the top SEO myths and talk about why they need to be put out to pasture.
- Google Page Rank and Google rankings are highly related – My blog is a perfect example of this myth. I assume I got dinged on the last Google update and yet I still rank well with my new posts. It would be great if this is true right but it is not. Do a search on Google and you will find lots of low PR pages out ranking higher PR pages and domains.
- Now that personalization is here, ranking are totally dead – Has personalization watered down positioning? Yep but has not killed it completely. Start using “&pws=0″ at the end of your Google search URLs to see how much if any the changes of personaliztion have changed your rankings.
- Meta tags are still used in rankings – I remember when I first started in SEO my old boss would get mad if I did not use the alloted amount of characters in your meta keywords and description tags you were not doing your job. Granted this was in 1995 when it did mean something but now they do not effect your rankings.
- CSS and Java are not read by Google – Not true at all. Years ago when I was performing some A/B testing on the company website we were using Java script to perform the redirects. Google was indexing and caching those pages back then and now they are even smarter. If you think they are not reading CSS you are sadly mistaken so make sure your not playing any games with your CSS style sheet!
- Linking out helps your rankings – Not true at all. Again “natural” is the key. When you have good site you want to link out to then just link out to it. The game is links coming in, not going out.
- H1 tags are need for SEO success – I like the use of H1 tags in your overall SEO on page optimization but they are not the end all be all. Actually SEOMOZ did a study that showed little corrlation between having H1 tags and top positioning.
- SEO is a one time shot and your done - Man, I love this one! SEO is an investment. An investment in time, resources, results, and most of all expectations. As your website grows, so should your SEO.
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