SEO Myths Busted IV

Theo van der Zee (@theovdzee)

CEO & Co-founder, FinishJoomla (@finishjoomla)

Joomla!Day Germany, September 2011

SEO Myths Busted

Theo van der Zee

Follow me on Twitter: @theovdzee and @finishjoomla

PageRank

Myths

Linking outUp-to-date

Meta keywords

Suffix

Reciprocal links

Source: http://www.slingshotseo.com/resources/white-papers/google-ctr-study/

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

Perfectcorrelation

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

Myth I: “PageRank is a highly important metric”

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

Myth I: “PageRank is a highly important metric”

Source: http://www.elated.com/articles/website-conversion-rates-for-beginners/

Better metrics than PageRank

Myth I: “PageRank is a highly important metric”

Source: http://www.majesticseo.com/

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”

The rel=“nofollow” standard is adopted by all major search engines.

“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

BC

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”

The anchor text is one of the most important aspects of a link.

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

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

theo@finishjoomla.com

@finishjoomla