SEO Myths Based on Experience

SEO is confusing it’s not for everyone to make it more complex here are some of the SEO myths that you should know, fun fact we actually experienced this during the course of our Search Engine optimizations for our clients.

Social Media is a Ranking Factor

This is not true to be exact every time we get a viral content for some odd reason our site traffic is losing visitor from organic search.

This might just be in our case but the truth is Google even admitted the social media is not a ranking factor and we find this ok.

Why? social media post can easily be manipulated, from fake likes to fake shares.

Besides, we actually discourage business owners to use social media for their content especially on Facebook as organic reach is currently a joke.

You will get penalized for copying content

This is false, admittedly we initially thought that if you copy content from other websites regardless if its word for word is that you will get penalized. We learned this the hard way, here is the scenario.

We have been seating on this content and realized not a single website made an article or piece about it, so in the end we published it and oh boy the traffic surged for one of our client websites.

What we didn’t know is some other website will copy our content “word for word”.

So what Google did? They indexed the competing website and to add insult in the injury they ranked higher.

So in summary google won’t penalize you if you copy content if you have better domain ranking or authority you will basically run over the competition unless they lawyer up which is unlikely.

No follow will not index your pages Not true, again we learned this the wrong way as the UAT (user acceptance testing) of our website was indexed and o boy this affected our rankings so bad our Ahref rank tanked so bad.

So how did we fix it? we placed x-tags no index.

Note: Do not combine no index and no follow as this will no de index your page, you will need to add follow until the page is actually removed from google.

Disvow will fix penguin penalties

Nope, it won’t as we have a client with this problem, for the past years they are getting insane organic traffic to their website then they got hit by the penguin update.

This where we come in and talked to them what they did was basically a violation of Google’s guidelines as they paid to get backlinks using automated software.

Here are the steps we took, we analyzed all the links the good the bad and the ugly then disvowed which does not fit.

Admittedly this was a long process but we managed, note that after this they still have a good amount of good backlinks however as time passes they never recovered with the penalty to the point they had to shut down the brand and redo all over again.

So in short nope disvow wont fix penalties at least not for our cases.

Duplicate Content on the website does not affect rankings

It totally does, based on our experience even a small amount of duplicate content will hurt your ranking badly.

So how will you know if you have duplicate content? check the search console’s HTML improvement area it will display contents that are almost identical.

With this information, you can begin curing this pages that are marked as a copy of the other.

Here is what we did, after checking the content decide if it’s worth keeping if not just delete it as in this case having a copy is not a good thing.

The second approach is making the other content less identical to the other by adding additional data in it.

Content is King

This is debatable however for us “content is not king” instead a high domain ranking or trust website is King even if the content is thin.

This is proven on one our client’s competition,  their website have an insane amount of backlinks majority are web 2.0 spam in any case the competing website has high domain ranking.

So what we did is pick one of their ranking content, of course, we chose the thinnest article.

How thin? barely a paragraph in it.

We then did a well-researched article that we can think of adding extra images even a video for the matter then we published back 2017. Until now which is 2018 that article has not bitten the competitors content.

So whats the take away here? Better content does not necessarily make your page ranking better its a combination of good ranking website and content altogether which is a paradox if you think about it.

Why? in order to have a good website you will need a good content however for a content to rank you will need a good website.

You will need external factors for your content to rank higher as you need to consider page speed, technical SEO, the hardest backlink building (We totally think link building should be removed as a ranking factor we will discuss this on a separate post), and other factors.

 

We will gradually update this content if something comes up for the meantime share in the comments what SEO myths we should look into or if you have any, by all means, share them.