The 18 lies our SEO peers seem to believe. Total transparency, this is basically a reproduction of the 10 SEO Myths written by Cyrus Shepard https://moz.com/blog/seo-myths With another 8 of my own which I hear far too often! Delivered by Jay Best (http://www.freshzeal.com) for our local SEO Meetup group: http://www.meetup.com/Auckland-SEO-PPC-Affiliate-Email-Marketing-Group/

1. www.websitename.com
THE SEO MYTHS
WE HEAR
This is a list of the common fallacies around SEO. The ones that drive us nuts.

2. Because SEO changes constantly, is quite complex and requires a lot of stuff to learn, then
information can get distorted, and people seem to perpetuate some of these ridiculous urban
legends.
I have based this preso on the following Moz resource, and also added several of my own that
are embarrassing from within NZ
https://moz.com/blog/seo-myths
INTRODUCTION

3. COMMON MYTHS
That are the most annoying!
2.GOOGLE WILL FIGURE IT OUT
The temptation of many website owners and
developers is to throw as many URLs as
possible—sometimes millions—at Google's
crawlers and pray that their mysterious
algorithms will magically deliver these pages to
valuable users.
“LINK BUILDING IS DEAD”
Recently the SEO world got worked up
when Google's John Mueller stated link building
is something he'd "try to avoid."
Many misinterpreted this to mean that link
building is bad, against the rules, and Google
will penalize you for it.
1. SEO IS A SCAM
Sadly, many business owners have been
approached by less-than-ethical marketing
vendors who promise SEO services but
basically deliver nothing. If you are paying
$49/month to a service that promises you top
rankings in Google, it is almost certainly a
scam.
3. WE DID SEO ONCE
Congratulations. Buy yourself a cookie.
It's sad to see organic search traffic fall over
time, but all too often that's exactly what
happens when no effort is applied. Continually
maintaining your SEO efforts is essential



4. GOOGLE’L WORK IT OUT
Google will indexing and find all my pages
No. No they friggin' won't.
Here's what many webmasters see far too often when they trust search engines to do their
SEO for them.
The temptation of many website owners and developers is to throw as many URLs as
possible—sometimes millions—at Google's crawlers and pray that their mysterious algorithms will
magically deliver these pages to valuable users. Alternatively, even sites with a handful of pages
expect search engines to do all the heavy lifting.
Google is smart, but not magic.
What's forgotten in this equation is that Google and other search engines strive to mimic human
behavior in evaluating content (and no human wants to sort through a million near-duplicate
pages) and use human generated signals (such as links and engagement metrics) to crawl
and rank results.
Every page delivered in search results should be unique, valuable, and more often than not
contain technical clues to help search engines sort them from the billions of possible pages on
the web. Without these qualities, search marketing is a game of chance that almost always
loses.

5. WE DID SEO ONCE
I washed myself today as well!
Congratulations. Buy yourself a cookie.
It's sad to see organic search traffic fall over time, but all too often that's exactly what happens
when no effort is applied. Continually maintaining your SEO efforts is essential because of:
Link degradation (a.k.a. link rot)
Publishing new pages
Evolving search engine algorithms
The competition moving ahead of you
Outdated content
...and more
For a small minority of sites, SEO doesn't need continual investment. My father-in-law's auto
shop is a perfect example. He has more business than he needs, and as long as folks find
him when searching for "Helfer Auto" he's happy. In this case, simply monitoring your SEO with
the addition of a deeper dive 2-3 times per year may be sufficient.
For the rest of us, one-and-done SEO falls short.

6. www.websitename.com
LINK BULDING IS DEAD
Yet again..
Sigh.
Recently the SEO world got worked up when Google's John Mueller stated link building is
something he'd "try to avoid."
Many misinterpreted this to mean that link building is bad, against the rules, and Google will
penalize you for it.
In fact, nothing has changed that the fact that search engines use link authority and anchor text
signals heavily in their search ranking algorithms. Or that white-hat link building is a completely
legitimate and time-tested marketing practice.
I'm certain John was referring to the more manipulative type of link building, no doubt
encountered frequently at Google. To be fair, this type of non-relevant, scaled approach to links
should be avoided at all costs, and search engines have taken great strides to algorithmically
detect and punish this behavior.
Marketers build links in a number of natural ways, and attracting links to your website remains
darn-near essential for any successful SEO undertaking.

7. COMMON MYTHS part 2
That are the most annoying!
6.GOOGLE HATES SEO
Some days, it feels that way.
In truth, Google's relationship with SEO is
much more nuanced.
8. SEO IS ALL TRICKS
“The only way you can do SEO is to do
naughty stuff” and my absolute fav is “That is
illegal SEO”
5. I WANT TO WIN THE VANITY
No. No you friggin' don't.
In a niche, there are the primary or Vanity
words, and everyone fixates on wanting to win
these few words. It’s a bigger world than that.
7. SEO is dead: Knowledge Graph
It's scary for SEOs when we ask Google a
question and see an actual answer instead of
a link, as in the example below. It's even
more frightening when Google takes over entire
verticals such as theweather, mortgage
calculators, or song lyrics.



8. I WANT THE VANITY WORD!
Rather than total traffic
No. No you friggin' don't.
Look, here's a personal example. I really want to rank #1 for "SEO" because Moz offers SEO
software. Because of our Beginner's Guide to SEO. Because SEO is our lifeblood.
But we don't, and it doesn't matter.
Moz typically ranks #2-3 for "SEO". It sends good traffic, but not nearly as good as the
thousands of long-tail keywords with more focused intent. In fact, if you went through our entire
keyword set, you would find that "SEO" by itself only sends a tiny fraction of our entire traffic,
and we could easily survive without it.
The truth is, when you create solid content focused around topics, you almost always receive
far more (and oftentimes better) traffic from long-tail keywords that you didn't try to rank for.
The magic happens when visits reach your site because the content matched thier needs, but
not necessarily when you matched the right keywords.

9. GOOGLE HATES SEO
More that they hate black hat..
Some days, it feels that way.
In truth, Google's relationship with SEO is much more nuanced.
Google readily states that SEO can "potentially improve your site and save time" and that many
SEO agencies "provide useful services." Google even advises "If you're thinking about hiring an
SEO, the earlier the better."
Google published their own SEO Starter Guide. While a bit out of date, it certainly encourages
people to take advantage of SEO techniques to improve search visibility.
Google Analytics offers a series of SEO Reports. Keep in mind, these are almost laughably
unusable due to the handicapped data quality.
While Google seems to encourage search engine optimization, it almost certainly hates
manipulative SEO. The type of SEO meant to trick search engines into believing false popularity
and relevancy signals in order to rank content higher.
In fact, many of the myths in the post boil down to some folks' inability to distinguish between
hard-working SEO and search engine spam. Which leads us to:

10. SEO’S DEAD Knowledge Graph
Yet again..
It's scary for SEOs when we ask Google a question and see an actual answer instead of a
link, as in the example below. It's even more frightening when Google takes over entire verticals
such as theweather, mortgage calculators, or song lyrics.
With the flip of a button, it seems Google can wipe out entire business models.
In reality, search growth and traffic continues to grow for most industries. Consider the following:
World Internet and search activity continues to rise, particularly in the mobile sector. This
generally indicates that more users are performing more searches on a greater number of
devices.
MozCast reports only 4.9% of Google searches result in an answer box.
A recent study by Stone Temple showed that 74.3% of Google answer boxes contained linked
attribution, while the rest was public domain knowledge.
Anecdotal evidence further suggests that even when presented with answer boxes, a large
number of users click through to the cited website.
People want answers, but at least for now they also want their websites.

11. SEO IS TRICKS!
Illegal tricks!
Really? This is plain sad. Somebody make me a sad salad.
"Tricks" is what professionals call bad, manipulative SEO that gets you penalized. The problem,
I believe, is the first thing any developer or marketing manager hears about SEO is something
close to "put more keywords in the title tag."
If that's all SEO is, it does sound like tricks.
Real SEO makes every part of content organization and the browsing experience better. This
includes:
• Creating content that reverse engineers user needs
• Making content more discoverable, both for humans and search engine crawlers
• Improving accessibility through site architecture and user experience
• Structuring data for unambiguous understanding
• Optimizing for social sharing standards
• Improving search presence by understanding how search engines generate snippets
• Technical standards to help search engines categorize and serve content to the right
audience
• Improving website performance through optimizations such as site speed
• Sharing content with the right audiences, increasing exposure and traffic through links and
mentions
Each of these actions is valuable by itself. By optimizing your web content from every angle,
you may not even realize you're doing SEO, but you'll reap many times the rewards.

12. PAGE RANK
Its not quite so simple.
Actually, I like PageRank.
But it's still a flippin' myth.
PageRank was an incredibly innovative solution allowing Google to gauge the popularity of a
webpage to the point that they could build the world's best search engine on the concept.
Despite what people say, PageRank is very likely still a part of Google's algorithm (although
with severely reduced influence). More than that, PageRank gave Google the ability to build
more advanced algorithms on top of the basic system.
Consider concepts like Topic Sensitive Page Rank or even this recent paper on entity
salience from Google Research which highlights the use of a PageRank-like system.

13. PAGE RANK
Part 2
So why is PageRank such a bad myth?
1.Toolbar PageRank, the PageRank most SEOs talk about, will likely never be updated again.
2.PageRank correlates poorly with search engine rankings, to the point that we quit studying it
long ago.
3.PageRank was easy to manipulate.
Fortunately, Google has moved away from talking about PageRank or supporting it in a public-
facing way. This will hopefully lead to an end of people using PageRank for manipulative
purposes, such as selling links and shady services.
If you're interested, several companies have developed far more useful link metrics including
Majestic's Citation Flow, Ahrefs Rank, and Moz's Page and Domain Authority.

14. THE OTHER ONES
These are more common in NZ / are still common

META KEYWORDS!
I hear designers and SEO’s still talking about meta keywords. 90s
called, they want their SEO back(* Bing may)

I’VE GOT A SECRET!
AKA Blackhat methods – Cloaking, keyword stuffing, anchor text
overoptimisation, Blog comment links, bad blog networks, white text,
also most inexperienced SEOs fixate on On Page factors.

SOCIAL DOESN’T COUNT
7%is the actual impact. FB not as much, Twitter again, and G+
disproportionally more than it should!

USAGE DATA IS IGNORED
It isn’t – stuff like bounce rates, time on site etc, I have seen this
cover for some horrid sites from a pure SEO perspective

15. THE OTHER ONES
These are more common in NZ / are still common

DISAVOW IS A TRAP
People don’t use it, or believe it is only for spam detection 
I’VE GOT A SECRET!
AKA Blackhat methods – Cloaking, keyword stuffing, anchor text
overoptimisation, Blog comment links, bad blog networks, white text,

ADWORD = SEO RANK
I have heard SEMs trying to swing a sale and using this. Also the
“We have a special relationship”

MATT CUTTS IS GOD
“He never lies, and what he says is facts forever” You may be
watching an old vid, also watch his weasel words.

16. THE OTHER ONES
These are more common in NZ / are still common

RICH SNIPPETS
JSON-LD / Microdata / http://schema.org / Rich Snippets
automatically add your listings to SERP / Knowledge Graph

SUBMIT TO RANK
I saw that Zeald charges $500 to submit the URL to Bing, Yahoot
and Google – this is a 5 min task, and you want to submit
sitemap not just primary URL. And you have to get on page done

RAW LINK COUNT
I get people asking for a 500 links / week contract, I would often
rather work a higher rank strategy, or be selective.

THAT THERE IS CERTAINTY
Or that any answer to SEO questions is a finite “yes” It is almost
always “It depends”
We joked about having a pubquiz format with no known answers.

17. MOBILE SLAM?
Did we get hit? Not too bad overall
“I think one of the difficulties here is that it is a very broad change. So while it’s had a fairly big impact across all the
search results, it doesn’t mean that in every search result you will see very big changes. So that is something that affects
a lot of different sites, a lot of different queries, but it is not such that the sites disappear from the search results
completely if they are not mobile friendly.
On the one hand, that makes a lot of sense for the sites that aren’t able to go mobile friendly yet, maybe like small
businesses who don’t have the time or the money to set their sites for that. These are results that are still fairly relevant
in the search results, so we need to keep them in there some how.
The other aspect that we noticed is that a lot of sites really moved forward on going mobile. So where we expected
essentially a little bit of a bigger change, because of maybe bigger sites that weren’t mobile friendly, did take the time to
go mobile friendly and with that, they didn’t see that much of a change.”
https://www.seroundtable.com/google-mobile-friendly-algo-let-down-20272.html

18. www.websitename.com
THANK YOU FOR YOUR TIME
Presenter: Jay Best
CREDIT
As mentioned https://moz.com/blog/seo-myths is main source