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View Full Version : SEO lies, folk lore and old wives tales



Harold Mansfield
01-03-2015, 12:48 PM
SEO is hard enough to understand without all of the bad information out there.
You can save a lot of time if you don't waste time on the misinformation.

I thought it would be fun to start a thread listing all of the bad information we've heard over the years that people have wasted time on.

One of my favorites is a guy that told me that all of his links must be Google blue because it was proven that color increases click through ratios, and helps his SEO with better search placement.
Never mind the fact that his site was a train wreck in both design and content.
When I suggested that maybe he spend more time on the credibility of his information, he told me it didn't matter. Apparently Google blue holds mystical powers.

The truth is that Google did do a study on which colors people click more on their search result and ad links, and Google blue did win and is what they use, but the study never ventured into proving that was the case on all websites, nor that sites who use that color on their internal links get better placement.

But that didn't stop a bunch of hacks from disseminating that bad info all over the web.

What are some others that you've heard over the years?

Brian Altenhofel
01-03-2015, 05:51 PM
"We'll get your brand new website ranked #1 for <insert highly competitive keyword> within 90 days."

I've been in a meeting where the SEO people were presenting their results to the client by showing them "actual searches" while not taking into account how Google personalizes results based on location and your search and click-thru history. When adding &pws=0 to the URL, the client dropped to Page 30 from the #1 slot, and when searching through a proxy they no longer appeared in the map box for "<client's service> <city>".

billbenson
01-03-2015, 10:24 PM
"We'll get your brand new website ranked #1 for <insert highly competitive keyword> within 90 days."

I've been in a meeting where the SEO people were presenting their results to the client by showing them "actual searches" while not taking into account how Google personalizes results based on location and your search and click-thru history. When adding &pws=0 to the URL, the client dropped to Page 30 from the #1 slot, and when searching through a proxy they no longer appeared in the map box for "<client's service> <city>".

And that one is really fraud as the SEO companies doing this stuff know they can put someone in the number one spot for a short period of time, only to have disappeaar in a month or two.

billbenson
01-03-2015, 10:37 PM
For honorable mention, meta tag keywords. Especially when its every keyword in the dictionary. I was told recently that keywords are being phased out by G. I'm assumuming he meant keywords in the code, not content. I have trouble believing you shouldn't use a title tag at least or image tags unless G can read images in the format they are pushing. It does say what the page is about, but then so does the page copy. People do search for keywords...

Brian Altenhofel
01-04-2015, 04:20 AM
Yeah, pretty much only spammers should use the meta keywords tag (http://moz.com/community/q/meta-keywords-should-we-use-them-or-not).

billbenson
01-04-2015, 06:33 AM
Yeah, pretty much only spammers should use the meta keywords tag (http://moz.com/community/q/meta-keywords-should-we-use-them-or-not).

But what do you think about the description tag if it only applies to the content on the page?

While it has certainly been used for spam reasons, If you have a page on 1940 gas engines and the description says, " 1940 gas engines", G can verify that the description is not false. Then that goes to the title tag which also should say " 1940 gas engines" as well. If not for security reasons it will appear at the top of the pages so viewer that look there know they are in the right place? But then the meta description and title tags are redundant. As I am writing this, it seems to me that you shouldn't use the meta description, but the title tag, if done properly, shouldn't be a problem, rather a requisate, even if it has no effect on search engine rankings.

Brian Altenhofel
01-04-2015, 07:08 AM
Google's pretty clear about the title and meta description (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35624?hl=en).

Harold Mansfield
01-04-2015, 03:26 PM
Another one that I wrote about recently is making all of your page URLs end in .html.

I don't know how or when this one started but it was all the rage a couple of years ago. I even saw people I consider reputable doing it.
I'm no engineer or mathematician but it never really made any sense to me post the 90's. I even tried it out for a few weeks and I just couldn't take how my URLs looked. I figured if it had any truth to it, that it would just be one thing that I didn't practice.

I've since read that it really was all BS and it didn't make a difference to Google as long as you used pretty permalinks and had good content and design.

Anyone else ever jump on that one?

nerochat
01-08-2015, 12:12 PM
I think the main problem with SEO companies is that they use their websites to get you good rank, but once you stop paying they remove your website....

KristineS
01-08-2015, 12:59 PM
Writing keyword stuffed article pages to get ranking for certain keywords. That was huge for a while, and resulted in site having pages they didn't really need in an effort to get the site ranked for a particular keyword.

turkeysub
02-07-2015, 07:40 PM
All of these hokey tricks are so dumb. Google is smarter than any of us, they aren't going to fall for any of this. You just got to do it right and put in the time.

quamz0
02-16-2015, 02:22 AM
All of these hokey tricks are so dumb. Google is smarter than any of us, they aren't going to fall for any of this. You just got to do it right and put in the time.

They stopped falling for this years ago, delete your keyword meta tag it will get you penalized and optimize your title and description but they do nothing for google rankings and almost nothing for yahoo/bing rankings.

DigiWizi
02-23-2015, 02:41 PM
Meta keywords were phasing out in 2008 when I really started getting heavily into SEO.

The fact is, aside from the Google blue link styling (which is hilarious), SEO Pros do try but a lot of them are just mildly knowledgeable and money hungry. Business owners often refuse to pay a lot of times unless the promise is laughably huge and the price is lower than what you would expect to pay for labor in undeveloped countries. Then they are bitter because the less than educated novice SEO lied about their amazing prowess. To make matters worse Google makes dozens of changes per year and has been since 2010 when they pretty much decided to out of nowhere make 20x the tweaks to their algorithms and results pages.

As an SEO you have to be on top and stay on top. To do that, you have to have customers who are willing to take a risk, at least a small one.

Harold Mansfield
02-23-2015, 03:43 PM
...
The fact is, aside from the Google blue link styling (which is hilarious),

Had a guy pay me once to change all of his links to "Google blue". I could not talk him out of it. He was adamant. What was I supposed to do? So I took his money and did it.

DigiWizi
02-23-2015, 04:05 PM
Had a guy pay me once to change all of his links to "Google blue". I could not talk him out of it. He was adamant. What was I supposed to do? So I took his money and did it.

Actually that's probably great for conversion rate optimization though and in theory if the users are clicking through to more pages, Google would get that data via tracking cookies and probably give the site a slight boost. Rise in dwell time, CTR, pages visited are generally good UX signals which based on big G's business model could in fact help. The problem is, chances are the traffic sample is too low to get a solid A/B test on whether or not "Google Blue" would increase CTR for that specific design.

Regardless, the customer asked for something and you gave it to the customer, nothing wrong with that.

Kumar Palani
02-25-2015, 06:30 AM
To me SEO has nothing to do with "Google Blue", in reality website that rank on Google rarely have a large number of incoming links these days. Google has long given up on PR, which means PR and Quantity of links no longer plays an important role (almost no role at all). Things are changing lately, Google values relevant content, constant update of onpage elements (preferably text contents and creation of new pages with information), Social Engagements, Brand Value and finally quality links with relevant anchor text from trust worthy websites (No follow or Dofollow matters little these days).


"Google blue" myth is something I already heard of but there is nothing true about it. Creative anchor text and useful content plays more in terms of click through than color of the text does.

chrismarklee
02-25-2015, 07:15 AM
SEO takes tons of time. The most important aspect of it is to do manual do follow back links. You do not want to look anything close to spam or link farm generated.

DigiWizi
02-26-2015, 12:02 AM
It's quite simple really, just be innovative and original. Been this way for a long time but don't discount the SEO professionals.

In truth, what most people don't understand as small business owners is that search engine optimization professionals spend their every waking moment trying to understand how to best get to the top of Google. While most business owners are running their businesses, these marketers are looking for ways to get to the closest point between evergreen optimization and a penalty so they can rank sites above competition.

It takes absolute dedication, there are literally millions of amateurs claiming to be true SEO pros and giving those of us who live and breath it a bad name. There are many wives tales, just don't be too bitter.

Phil Gregory Seo
03-05-2015, 05:58 AM
To sum up, listen to what they are saying, speak to a range of people offering a range of services at different price points. If it seems to good to be true, it probably is! *TIP Always work with someone you can meet easily. Nothing like sitting round a table and seeing stats, looking in peoples eyes, seeing the way they work and their premises, to get a feel of their skill set.

nobevo
03-09-2015, 06:50 AM
Best optimization for google is the ebst content, Google is doing a lot in the background to truly understand the content of a site. Backlinks will get less and less important over time, especially now that more and more big publishers do content with paid links.