There are many SEO myths circulating on the Internet. These misconceptions are often crazy and while some are based on partial reality, others have spread due to the lack of being proved wrong.
Here is an example: Let’s assume you make a change to your website content. Maybe after a few days you notice that your Google ranking for a certain keyword has altered. Now, it would be natural for you to assume that your content change had led to change in ranking. However, it may not be true. Your ranking could have changed due to several reasons, and may have absolutely nothing to do with the changes made to the content.
There are many SEO myths circulating on the Internet. These misconceptions are often crazy and while some are based on partial reality, others have spread due to the lack of being proved wrong.
Here is an example: Let’s assume you make a change to your website content. Maybe after a few days you notice that your Google ranking for a certain keyword has altered. Now, it would be natural for you to assume that your content change had led to change in ranking. However, it may not be true. Your ranking could have changed due to several reasons, and may have absolutely nothing to do with the changes made to the content.
Here are 10 of the most common organic-SEO myths:
Organic SEO Myth 1: Multiple Website Domains for Multiple Products- More and more, people are being told to create multiple domains for the different areas of their business to create more recognition amongst search engines. WRONG! This is a bad practice for multiple reasons. First of all, it can be expensive, very time-consuming to maintain, and totally unnecessary. Second, search engines can pick up on the attempt to trick them and decrease your rankings on all pages. Also, all incoming links to all these sites are spread very thin. The best option would be to put all the time, money, effort, and link-building into one site and reap the benefits of having a stream-lined, collaborative site.
Organic SEO Myth 2: In order to get better ranking, you absolutely need a Google Sitemap. It’s partially correct. However, if you have built your site properly (ensured its crawler-friendly) you don’t require a Google Sitemap. That being said, having one won’t hurt you and you can even use other Webmaster Central tools offered by Google, but this doesn’t guarantee higher ranking.
Organic SEO Myth 3: For higher rankings, update your website regularly. Regular updating of your content pages may certainly increase the crawl rate for search engines, but not your website rankings. Only update your website content it is necessary and not because search engines will like it any better. As a matter of fact, the highest ranked websites on Google are those that haven’t been updated in years!
Organic SEO Myth 4: PPC (pay per click) ads can help or hurt rankings. What amuses me most is that several people believe that participating in Google AdWords campaigns will hurt their organic SEO ranking, while many other believe that PPC will spike the traffic and up the ranking. All I can say is that neither of this is true!
Organic SEO Myth 5: Not following guidelines on Google will ban your website. Google’s guidelines are common sense but not mandatory. It’s advisable to read them, however just don’t do any thing purely for search engines and you’ll be fine.
Organic SEO Myth 6: Buying links can lead to banning of your website. It is partially true again. Google doesn’t like to count paid links as votes for a website page. Mostly Google is unable to find out if the links are paid for, but even if it does, it won’t count the links. Google won’t ban your website in any case. A quick update, Google has made it easier to report paid links in sites that are unrelated to your site. Thought the reasoning is yet unclear and best practice should tell you don’t buy links in unrelated site to your theme.
Organic SEO Myth 7: Header tags or H1 should be used to ensure high ranking. There is no evidence to prove this. However, this is one of the most common myths. You can reach top Google positioning without H1 but they certainly don’t hurt so use H tags correctly.
Organic SEO Myth 8: The more reciprocal links to other sites you have, the higher your Google page rank goes.
Explanation: Outbound links to related and unrelated sites are factored into page rank. Reciprocated links count higher than unreciprocated links. The more quality inbound links to your site, the higher the PR, but nobody knows exactly how Google factors their PR and their algorithm is constantly adjusted. A gazillion links to and from unrelated sites could drop your PR and if your site is found linking to obvious FFA or link farms, your site could be penalized as being ‘guilty by association’.
Organic SEO Myth 9: Search engines cannot index pages with Flash and using Flash in your page will lower it’s ranking.
Explanation: This is a big myth. Search engines cannot index a Flash movie itself, but, if you specify Flash text (in the HTML) used in the movie, the text in the movie along with the rest of the page HTML will be indexed. Flash does nothing to keep the page from being properly indexed, nor does it keep your page from being crawled. Search engines don’t like pages that re-direct, including Flash pages that do it automatically. It’s the auto-redirect, not the Flash file that keeps a splash page from being ranked..
Organic SEO Myth 10: Money Spent on SEO is A Waste- Are you serious? Many corporations and small businesses alike have a hard time appropriating funds for search engine optimization strategy. It is justified in the minds of business owners and senior marketing professionals that money spent on traditional media like direct mail, print ads, and television commercials drive in mostly untargeted, general traffic to your site. Search engines drive people that are already looking for your products. How can that be an unimportant practice?