10 SEO Myths Debunked
The SEO landscape is unstable. Frequent search engine algorithm updates make business hard for webmasters to sustain a profitable website. SEO is no magic wand to swish and mint money. It is a subject necessitating in-depth study and analysis, keeping abreast of recent trends and employing “trial and error” methods to realise what works and what does not work for any website.
The instability gives rise to various SEO myths, which marketers and webmasters start to believe as popular hearsay. This article debunks ten such SEO myths.
10 SEO Myths Debunked
These may come across as a surprise. Tighten your seat belts!
SEO Myth 1: Guest Blogging is dead.
Guest blogging is NOT dead. Understand it once and for all. Yes, Matt Cutts said to “stick a fork in it”, but he does not proclaim its death. What Cutts means is that you should stop guest blogging if you were using it to spam blogs with mediocre content with the sole intention to get backlinks.
Take up any popular blog, and you will find that guest contributors form a major chunk of their content generation policy. Are they penalised? No. Are you? Yes. You are pursuing guest contribution the wrong way.
SEO Myth 2: Link Building is dead.
For God’s sakes, link building can never be dead. In this video, Matt says that Google Inc. did an experiment to boot out all links from search engine and found that the results were far worst than it is with links.
Therefore, links are here to stay.
What you should do is follow white-hat link curation practices.
SEO Myth 3: Content is the king.
It is a popular perception among content creators, marketers and webmasters that if a website publishes great content, traffic will start flowing in!
This cannot be farther from the truth. See, content is the king, but marketing is the queen! We all know that it is tough to survive without the queen, isn’t it?
Therefore, it is great that you are investing a lot of time and money into creating useful, informational and actionable share-worthy content but do not ever ignore the marketing part. Who will come to your blog or website if you do not promote it?
None. Nada!
All the content development efforts will go down the drain. Hence, chalk out a plan to target your audience first and then write content.
Is that clear?
SEO Myth 4: Press Releases are Relevant
Just the fact that you have an online business does not make it newsworthy. Write this down and etch it in your memory.
In earlier times when the masses still relied on good old newspapers for their daily news fodder, press releases were a way to ‘announce’ a newsworthy addition to business. Suppose, a business started offering a new product; they would publish a press release.
However, in the last couple of years, online press releases have spoiled its primary purpose. It has become a medium to gain dofollow backlinks than offering anything interesting news.
Use the press release medium sparingly. Unless you have anything newsworthy to share, refrain from it. Lastly, use top press release sites which can actually grab eyeballs to your business rather than the ‘free for all’, average PR aggregators.
This does not serve any SEO purpose.
SEO Myth 5: Article Submissions
This is such an overdone SEO method that it lost its relevancy. Yes, newbie so-called ‘SEO experts’ still push for article submissions on sites like Ezine Articles and imply how a dofollow link from such sites are valuable, it isn’t. Period!
There is no point in submitting to article directories for link building. Google’s web spam head has already said article directories are not given too much importance so what is the point in using them?
Moreover, content published on most article directory sites are of low quality; therefore, the dofollow link ultimately harms than it does any good for your website.
This does not serve any SEO purpose.
SEO Myth 6: Authorship Markup is essential.
In June 2011, Google announced the Authorship Markup metric which ties together the published content with its author through the Google+ profile page.
The update spread like wildfire speculating that Google Inc. will rank content based on this metric. Of course, a comment by Eric Schmidt did its part in fueling the speculation:
Within search results, information tied to verified online profiles will be ranked higher than content without such verification, which will result in most users naturally clicking on the top (verified) results. The true cost of remaining anonymous, then, might be an irrelevance.
However, there is no significant proof to justify this assumption. It’s 2017, and the importance of Google Authorship has reduced; however, it is good to claim Authorship because your image will show up in search results and that kind of lends credibility and influence with the reader.
SEO Myth 7: Infinite Scrolling is Recommended
Adding infinite scrolling on your site is actually a good idea, but it is NOT recommended for all kinds of sites. Take Facebook, for example. They have linear infinite scrolling, and it works with their model because it functions as a kind of storytelling and users are comfortable with it.
On the other hand, take Mashable. They too have infinite scrolling, but it is damn irritating and user intrusive. Adding the scroll on the homepage makes it worse. The purpose of a site homepage is to direct a reader/visitor to other areas of the site. Therefore, just imagine the frustration of a visitor who keeps on scrolling the homepage which leads to a bottomless pit. There is no direction.
The addition of infinite scrolling on the homepage is a bad move regarding practical SEO methods. Use it, if necessary, on inner pages but please, not on the homepage.
SEO Myth 8: Automate Everything!
Adding sliders, video, audio or animation on a site which auto-plays whenever anyone visits are not recommended.
Obviously, you chose to do it thinking it will increase conversions and grab the readers’ interest. However, the results are mostly in opposite order. It annoys the user and most often, the user hits the ‘stop’ button and proceeds further. Some sites do not even add the ‘stop’ button, and then there is no option for the user but to leave the site.
In 2013, the Nielsen Norman Group published a detailed study on auto-forwarding carousels and found that it annoys users and reduces visibility. You can read the findings here.
SEO Myth 9: Sole Dependence on Google is Right
I know this is a bold statement.
All of our SEO methods are always geared towards Google. We want to be compliant towards Google policies and build a business based solely on this search engine. In short, we are putting all the eggs in one basket, and that is a recipe for disaster in itself.
I am not asking you to ditch Google; instead, I am asking you to build your business on other traffic sources as well such as other search engines (Bing, DuckDuckGo and others), social media channels and other business networking methods. In retrospect, even if Google loses its love for your website, you have other options to fall back on!
SEO Myth 10: Social Links help.
There is no strong data to prove that social links help with site SEO and ranking. Surely, social shares help to improve brand visibility, but there is no conclusive data to show if they will help to rank your site higher.
The main reason is that Google Inc. does not have any access to Twitter and Facebook data. Google and Facebook do not see eye-to-eye and once upon a time, Google did have access to Twitter data but not anymore. Both the social sites have walled Google.
This does not mean you should stop using them. There are more important things than links!
Takeaway
I know at least one of these myths must have come as a surprise to you. SEO is a tricky business. Whether you hire an agency or DIY yourself, there is a steep learning curve. You need to really get involved in the niche to make the best of SEO.