Search engine optimization is an ever-changing field of truths, truisms, ideas, and beliefs. It’s the most evolutionary faith-based system I’ve ever encountered because things change every year.
Nonetheless, despite the fact that many SEO gurus tell you to constantly experiment, evaluate, and adjust a lot of well-known SEOs occasionally get a bad idea stuck in their thoughts — or they hang on to something too long.
I’ve done it myself. There is just no way to always be right in this business.
Here are some recent SEO myths still being given a great deal of love and attention on various blogs and forums.
Duplicate content gets you into the Supplemental Results Index – Why do so many SEOs believe this? Because when the Supplemental Results Index was first introduced in 2003 that appeared to be one of the reasons pages ended up there. However, when Google completely re-engineered itself with the Bigdaddy update of December 2005 – March 2006, the Supplemental Results Index became more like the “we don’t yet trust these pages” index. Until someone can show us otherwise, it’s more productive to think of the Supplemental Results Index as the place where all Web pages are placed until they earn enough trusted links to be admitted to the ranks of the Main Web Index. There is, in fact, a LOT of duplicate content that is in the Main Web Index. But Google tries not to show that content (or content it mistakenly believes is duplicate) by using the “Omitted Results” filter.
Omitted Results are Supplemental pages – Why do SEOs believe this? I have no idea. Omitted Results have been around for years but they always seem to be used to hide what Google thinks may be duplicate content. Google offers the Omitted Results link in shortened queries just in case its algorithm made a wrong guess.
The description meta tag does not affect rankings – Why do SEOs believe this? Probably because there appears to be no evidence to show that the description meta tag’s contents are indexed for relevance scoring. If you embed a unique phrase in a description meta tag you can search Google all day and that page won’t show up. Nonetheless, there is one way that the description meta tag can directly affect your rankings: Duplicate content. Yep. If you use the same description meta tag on all your pages, or the same as other people use, there’s a good chance your page(s) will be filtered into the Omitted Results zone. It’s a subtle distinction but an important one. Google doesn’t use the description meta tag to determine relevance but it does use the tag to identify potentially identical content. Why? Who knows?
You should check your pages’ (Toolbar) PR values when you see a PR update – Why do SEOs believe this? Ignorance. Stubborness. Plain and simple. It’s not like every major SEO blog hasn’t told people repeatedly to ignore the Google Toolbar PageRank. Even so, you’ll see venerable sites like SE Roundtable officiously annotate every PR update as if it means something. There is no SEO value in looking at Toolbar PR. The idea of placing value in those numbers is so stupid I’ve just given up all hope of persuading people to stop looking at them. Every time you look at the Toolbar PR value for a page, you give me a decided advantage over you. Take that for what it’s worth.
The inanchor and allinanchor query operators show you who links to your site – Why do SEOs believe this? I have no idea. But I still see people misusing these query operators today. These operators tell the search engine to list ONLY pages that have been the recipients of the link anchor text specified by the query operators. So if you run a query for inanchor:”click here” you’ll see the Adobe Web page come up. But you’ll see a very different results set if you search for -inanchor:”click here” “click here”. Maybe one day people will get this straightened out, but I’m not counting on it any time soon. Programmers, especially, seem to really struggle with basic stuff like this.
Google’s Supplemental Pages are indexed and parsed for searching – Why do SEOs believe this? I have no idea. But here is a query that shows a supplemental page from Matt Cutts’ site. Call me when it shows up in the results for this query. Since the Bigdaddy update, Google has not been parsing the text on Supplemental Results pages. It is not indexing the text on those pages for resolving queries, and you’re screwed if all your pages have gone Supplemental. Feel free to contact 1st Query if you want help with Supplemental Results Pages. Better yet, get on every popular SEO blog and forum and tell Google to stop engaging in Web apartheid. Maybe they’ll listen if all Webmasters speak with one voice on the issue.
But I’m not holding my breath. These and other SEO myths continue to be shared in forums, on blogs, at SEO conferences, and probably in tons of SEO classes and seminars around the world. You can easily prove these are false ideas by testing them yourselves.
After all, what is the SEO Method? Experiment, evaluate, adjust.
Need I say more?
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Halfdeck 05.08.07 at 7:13 pm
In case you missed it, Matt’s comment on dupe content and supplemental results on SEOmoz’ whiteboard friday post:
“I’d agree with most of your video and your bullet points, but lean more toward Michael’s viewpoint on bullet point #2; duplicate content doesn’t make you more likely to have pages in the supplemental index in my experience.”
“It could be a symptom but not a cause, e.g. lots of duplicate content implies lots of pages, and potentially less PageRank for each of those pages. So trying to surface an entire large catalog of pages would mean less PageRank for each page, which could lead to those pages being less likely to be included in our main web index.”
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