Five SEO Myths Which Might Be Hurting Your Site

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Saturday, 17 December 2011 21:30

Published on Saturday, 17 December 2011 21:30

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SEO is tough enough to perform correctly as it is without being sidetracked by SEO myths and end up making costly mistakes. At best, doing things which will not really help your site’s SEO will divert time and energy which you could put to better use in optimizing your site. At worst you end up performing activities which actually hurt it.

These five common SEO myths come up often enough in emails I get to actually make it imperative we dispel them here.

#01. SEO Myth: Google Ads Will Help My SEO. Because Google is in the process of socialising Google Ads, including information about Click Through Rates (CTR) in Google Analytics and integrating the Google +1 Button in display ads, there is now a strong supposition by many webmasters that having Google Ads on their site will help their SEO and their site will be promoted higher in search engines. Actually this is wrong and if anything it is likely to hurt your site by triggering Google’s alerts for spam sites or sites with low quality content or sites with poor end-user experience.

Here is a short video by Google’s Director of Search, Matt Cutts, actually knocking this very particular nail on the head:

#02. SEO Myth: Underscores Are the Same as Dashes in a Website’s URL. This comes from mostly new webmasters who believe that because usability best practice dictates that a dash is clearer to understand in a URL than an underscore which may get hidden by an underline, then the two are pretty much the same with the exception of dashes being more legible. The truth is that for purely technical reasons which have to do with its origin, Google sees dashes as marks separating words but ignores underscores so, for example Help-My-SEO in a URL would get indexed by Google as three separate words but Help_My_SEO would get indexed as a single word: HelpMySEO. Dashes and underscores are not separate, but they are different and how you use them on your website really depends upon the kind of indexing in terms of search terms, you want to achieve.

#03. SEO Myth: The Length of Registration of a Website is a Ranking Factor. Now, this one is a little bit of a bugbear to tackle because there is a sound logic to it and there has been some propagation of the idea through many webmaster forums. It is an unfortunate effect of SEO knowledge that the wrong kind of it is often repeated the most and it is that which get to be believed, for that very reason. The truth is that while some sites which assess the value of a website’s SEO status through their own algorithm, do check for the length of time it has been registered for, and then allocate a higher value if it is registered from more than a year, Google does not. Google’s algorithm has been fine-tuned to check a website for value, relevancy and original content and its uses over 200 metrics to do so. The length of time a website is registered for is not one of them.

#04. SEO Myth: The Type of Domain you Have Affects your Country-based Indexing. Google is big on localisation and it is one of the main SEO drives for 2012. Its algorithm is sensitive enough to actually check a website’s IP address (i.e. its server location) and use that to determine whether it should be in the .com or .com.au or .fr or.de and so on, Google index. This means that you could get a top-level-domain (typically a .com) but if your server is based in France then your site will also get indexed in Google.fr and it will show up there. Google does not leave its filtering at that. It takes into account the Click Through Rates (CTRs) and typical end-user behaviour and further adjusts the country-specific indexing and ranking of a website.

#05. SEO Myth: New Pages Take a Long Time to Get Indexed. This is another one of those forum-propagated false pieces of information which is treated as gospel by newby webmasters. Google can index a brand new site within minutes of it going live, provided it is linked to by an authority website Google crawls regularly. So the trick is to make sure that the content of your website is socialised through the major social networks and that will lead the Google bot straight to you.

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