SEO Myths Busted III

Theo van der Zee (@theovdzee) CEO & Co-founder, FinishJoomla (@finishjoomla) Joomla!Day Greece, May 2011 SEO Myths Busted

Theo van der Zee

PageRank Myths Linking out Up-to-date Meta keywords Suffix Reciprocal links

Source: http://www.optify.net/seo/organic-click-through-rate/

Source: http://gs.statcounter.com/

“ PageRank is a highly important metric” Myth I:

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:PageRank-hi-res.png Myth I: “PageRank is a highly important metric”

Myth I: “PageRank is a highly important metric”

Correlation PageRank to Position 0 0.5 1 No correlation Perfect correlation PageRank 0.18 Source: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-science-of-ranking-correlations Myth I: “PageRank is a highly important metric”

Google Toolbar PageRank Updates Source: http://www.thenewsinn.com/next-google-page-rank-update-2011-history.html
January 2011
April 2010
December 2009
October 2009
May 2009
April 2009
December 2008
September 2008
July 2008
April 2008
January 2008
October 2007

An imprecise metric 4 5 PR 4 PR 4 Myth I: “PageRank is a highly important metric”

“ Our PageRank has dropped in the last PageRank update!Now what?” “ I don’t know, sue Google in court?” Myth I: “PageRank is a highly important metric”

Better metrics than PageRank
Number of customers
Conversion rate
Daily revenue per item
Inlinking root domains
Keywords sending visitors

PageRank is not important “ […] many site owners seem to think [PageRank] is the most important metric for them to track, which is simply not true.” -- Google Employee Susan Moskwa Source: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=6a1d6250e26e9e48 Myth I: “PageRank is a highly important metric”

“ PageRank is a highly important metric” Myth I: Busted?

“ Linking out to other websites is bad” Myth II:

What does Google say? “ In the same way that Google trusts sites less when they link to spammy sites or bad neighborhoods, parts of our system encourage links to good sites”. -- Head of Google’s Webspam team Matt Cutts Source: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/pagerank-sculpting/ Myth II: “Linking out to other websites is bad”

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:1_rio_de_janeiro_slum_2010.JPG Myth II: “Linking out to other websites is bad”

Source: http://seogadget.co.uk/google-page-penalty-for-comment-spam-rankings-and-traffic-drop/ Spammy comments Myth II: “Linking out to other websites is bad”

Rel=“nofollow” <a rel=“nofollow” href=“http://www.joomla.org”>No link value passed</a> Myth II: “Linking out to other websites is bad”

“ Linking out to other websites is bad” Myth II: Busted?

“ Trading links will increase rankings” Myth III:

Source: http://www.blog.organicapex.com/reciprocal-link/ Reciprocal links Myth III: “Trading links will increase rankings”

3-way reciprocal link A B C Myth III: “Trading links will increase rankings”

Important aspects of a link <a href=“http://www.joomla.org”> This is the anchor text </a> Myth III: “Trading links will increase rankings”

Source: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/10-illustrations-on-search-engines-valuation-of-links Links in content > Links outside content Myth III: “Trading links will increase rankings”

“ Trading links will increase rankings” Myth III: Busted?

“ Using a suffix will make your pages rank better” Myth IV:

.html http://www.example.org/index .html .php .exe .cgi .asp Myth IV: “Using a suffix will make your pages rank better”

What the big boys are doing
http://www.zappos.com/teva-mush-ii-island-navy
http://www.amazon.com/Psychology-Peter-Gray/dp/1429219475/
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/security/
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/evangelizing-a-datadriven-culture
Myth IV: “Using a suffix will make your pages rank better”

“ Using a suffix will make your pages rank better” Myth IV: Busted?

“ A regularly updated webpage ranks higher” Myth V:

The long tail Source: http://www.elliance.com/aha/infographics/long-tail-seo.aspx Myth V: “A regularly updated webpage ranks higher”

What about you? Myth V: “A regularly updated webpage ranks higher”

“ A regularly updated webpage ranks higher” Myth V: Busted?

“ Meta keywords tag boosts your rankings” Myth VI:

There he is again... “ [...] Google does not use the keywords meta tag in our web search” -- Head of Google’s Webspam team Matt Cutts Source: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/keywords-meta-tag-in-web-search/ “ I hope this clarifies that the keywords meta tag is not something that you need to worry about, or at least not in Google.” Myth VI: “Meta keywords tag boosts your rankings”

Entering the keywords Joomla! Administrator -> Global Configuration -> Site Myth VI: “Meta keywords tag boosts your rankings”

Meta description as shown in Google Meta title Meta description Myth VI: “Meta keywords tag boosts your rankings”

Extract meta keywords from page source Myth VI: “Meta keywords tag boosts your rankings”

“ Meta keywords tag boosts your rankings” Myth VI: Busted?

What did we learn?
Stop obsessing over PageRank
Link out to quality websites, don't link to bad neighborhoods
Use rel="nofollow" to stop the link juice
Handle reciprocal links with care
Don't use a suffix in your URL
Add new quality content on a regular basis
Stop entering meta keywords, start using them as a research tool

Questions?

@theovdzee Theo van der Zee [email_address] @finishjoomla

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SEO Myths Busted III

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