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

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

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

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.

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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THANK YOU FOR YOUR TIME Presenter: Jay Best

CREDIT As mentioned https://moz.com/blog/seo-myths is main source