SEO Myths: Learn The Facts, Don’t Believe The Fiction!

Learn The Facts, Don’t Believe The Fiction!
I have researched and thoroughly testing a lot of SEO techniques that have received terrible reputations due to myth and popular belief. It’s been going on for years! One person says their bad and everybody just believes it to be true. That is why I decided to run some tests and I must admit I was surprised to find several well known “facts” to be mere myths!
I own 63 test sites all hosted on different servers located around the United States and Canada. I have been testing the following techniques across several of those sites for over six months and have found the following statements to be 100% truth!
Myth #1 Duplicate Content Penalties
Google does NOT penalize sites due to duplicate content unless they are found to be in violation of copyright laws. Then they will simply remove the duplicated content from their index. In fact social media sites like Digg.com are made up of at least 75% duplicate content and yet the duplicated content often ranks higher than the original post!
But, what if I use the same content on more than one page of my website, then will Google penalize me? Well, if you use WordPress straight out of the box then your site has duplicate content all over it and so do most other WordPress blogs, so again we found that the site is not penalized, in severe cases Google will simply decide not to de-index the duplicated pages.
Myth #2 Submitting Your Site To Directories Is A Bad Idea
Says who? Getting your website listed with web directories will not harm your site in anyway. There are several great directories out there like Dmoz and the Yahoo directory that can increase your search engine rankings considerably! We strongly recommend submitting your website to directories, especially directories that allow deep linking!
Myth #3 Repeating Your Keywords/Phrases Excessively Will Help Your Site Rank Higher
This technique is called “keyword stuffing” and it is a horrible idea. During testing we found that our sites, that were ranked on the first page of Google, Yahoo, and Bing for their preferred keywords dropped off the radar when we decided to continually repeat the keywords/phrases that we were trying to rank better for, in fact we tried this on over 30 different websites and had the same results continuously! If your over optimizing your site with repeated keywords and phrases stop! It will only hurt your rankings!
Myth#4 XML Sitemaps Are Not Worth Using
Well, XML Sitemaps are simply to help the major search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing find all of your important pages. They act as a road map for your website and can even inform the search engines of what pages hold more value to you, the webmaster.
Since it only takes a few minutes to setup and it could potentially help the search engines index your website better, why wouldn’t you want to use a XML sitemap?
Myth #5 PageRank Is Not Of Any Value
I strongly disagree; the PageRank of a particular page is roughly based upon the quantity of inbound links as well as the PageRank of the pages providing the links. It is known that other factors, e.g. relevance of search words on the page and actual visits to the page reported by the Google toolbar also influence the PageRank.
PageRank has little to do with where your site ranks in search results it merely shows that Google considers the page important, or not so important. Other factors like anchor text, quality inbound links, content, page titles, and such will determine what keywords or key phrases your web page will rank highly for, so having a high PageRank means that Google considers your page important and that is good to know!
Experimenting, learning through seo experiments, and testing techniques is the only way to really know what works and what doesn’t in the world of search engine optimization, so we encourage you to not always believe what you hear and always test things on your own before falling for the hype!





