Debunking Popular Search Engine Ranking Myths

When it comes to SEO and getting your site recognized by search engines, there are a lot of facts and myths flying around the internet. If you’re doing the SEO for your site yourself, it’s very important to know what’s fact and what’s fiction, so you can discern where you should be spending your time so it’s not wasted. We’ve debunked lots of popular myths in this article, so read on if you’re not sure whether your technique is fact or fiction.

Myth 1: Pay Per Click advertising can either help or hurt my organic rankings.
Debunked: PPC is categorized entirely different than organic listings. As such, there is no effect either way on your ranking.

Myth 2: Websites are banned if they ignore Google guidelines.
Debunked: Generally it’s a good idea to read the Google Webmaster Guidelines so you can understand how the Google Crawler works, but you are not banned if you ignore their guidelines.

Myth 3: Websites are banned if they buy links.
Debunked: Sites which utilize link buying are not banned. The links which are bought are not counted toward the page’s overall rank.

Myth 4: Copy on a site’s pages must be a certain number of words, use a specific keyword density, and must contain both bold and italicized keywords.
Debunked: Back in the day, there was thought to be a magic number of keywords for each article on the web. This is simply not true. It also doesn’t matter whether you bold or italicize your keywords. It just doesn’t do anything to improve your ranking.

Myth 5: Duplicate content will get your website penalized.
Debunked: Your site will not be penalized, unless you count the duplicate content as not being counted toward your page rank as being penalized.

Myth 6: Reciprocal links don’t count.
Debunked: Every link to your site both in and out counts to a certain extent. The only instance where links do not count is if they are purchased links.

Myth 7: SEO companies can increase your rankings without doing any on-page work.
Debunked: If you hear this from any SEO company you’re considering hiring, run away as fast as you can. SEO isn’t magic, but then again, neither is it gambling. There is a certain formula to making your website appear at the top of search engines, and the best way to do that is either for your, or your company to optimize your pages for the search engines. That’s exactly what search engine optimization is.

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