3 SEO Myths Debunked

Search Engine Optimization can be tricky to master. How your website ranks is important to your business, but it is also the trade secret of another company (namely Google). Thankfully, it’s not a total guessing game. Testing, trial and error, as well as experience can go a long way. Unfortunately, there is plenty of SEO misinformation floating around and there are several ways these myths get passed around as true. The following myths all came about in the same way; an observation that somehow became an SEO truism. Put another way, correlation does not imply causation. If we add that to Occam’s Razor we can do some serious SEO debunking.

The Infamous Sandbox

Myth: New sites do not rank well because of the “Google sandbox”.
Reality: New sites can be indexed within minutes, and even rank well.
The Google sandbox refers to a time based ranking penalty that is given to new websites. More than likely, however, a new site just doesn’t deserve a higher ranking. It can be painful to hear, but just because it’s your website doesn’t mean it should be listed at the top right away. If you are in a competitive market, everyone above you in the rankings has spent years promoting their site, adding new content (more on this later) and building up their rankings. It’s a continuous process that can take some time. Just because low rankings often correlate with new sites, that doesn’t mean there’s a cause outside of proven and traditional SEO techniques.

.Edu Links

Myth: Links from a .edu domain have more weight than a link from a .com site.
Reality: You would take a link from the Google.com homepage over little Joey’s high school website any day.
Yesterday, the Business Insider reported that overstock.com got penalized because “Google’s algorithm assumes that links from .edu domains are from academic sites and gives them more weight than links from other kinds of sites.” Putting aside the anthropomorphism of having a bot going around assuming things, what makes academic results more relevant or more important anyway? If a university announces a football victory on their website, everyone searching for NFL scores has to wade through college football results? Even if this myth were true, wouldn’t the Google algorithm “assume” schools give out free publishing tools like blogs to their students; opening the floodgates of cat-blogging and black-hat link spamming. Links from university sites are valuable because they generally have authoritative, quality, and established websites. Not because they have .edu domain names.

It’s easy to see how these myths spread out of control too. On the same article you can read comments like, “I never knew that .edu backlinks were more powerful than other backlinks for search engines. Looks like I’m gonna have to change my search engine optimization strategy to building backlinks on .edu sites.” (Insert sigh of perpetual sadness here.)

Fresh Content

Myth: Google loves websites with fresh content.
Reality: This one is actually true (except the fresh content part).
Users like fresh content (or unique content, or useful content, or interesting content) and Google loves to deliver what users are looking for. A ten year old, unedited Wikipedia page may outrank anything new that comes along.

The opposite can be equally true as well. To demonstrate this, let’s run through a hypothetical experiment. Website A is about cooking exotic meats. (Pass the Gorilla, yum!) Website B is also about cooking exotic meats. Website A has three pages about what is safe to eat and how to prepare it. Website B posts a new recipe everyday on the blog, has active discussions on the forums, has helpful resources, lets users create a custom recipe book, writes articles about what is particularly delicious, etc, etc. Website B ranks higher because of all the fresh content? No! Website B is just better and probably more relevant to what people are searching for. (People who eat exotic meats are obviously always looking for something new.) What happens when your website is better? More people visit it, link to it, share it with social media, talk about it, blog about it, news outlets cover it, and traditional SEO comes into play.

If this myth was true, creating a page on your site that generates random gibberish everyday would improve your rankings. That would make the web a very bad place indeed. Anything that makes the web a bad place wouldn’t be encouraged by Google. Sometimes it helps to consider the perspectives of the search engines.

Bonus Myth Spin-off

Myth: Google loves Wordpress too!
Reality: Google would rather just be friends with Wordpress.
Doing a search for Google Loves Wordpress returns lots of results claiming this alleged love. This myth is really “Google loves fresh content” with a twist. After all, what is Wordpress but a platform to deliver fresh content? Unfortunately, claiming Google prefers a particular platform over another just lowers the credibility of the claim even more. For a moment, let’s forget that Google owns Blogger, a service in direct competition with Wordpress. One platform can be better optimized than another, that is true. However, Wordpress “out of the box” is not especially optimized for search engines. If it was, the All in One SEO Pack plug-in wouldn’t have over 7 million downloads. To make this myth true, one would have to say, “Google loves quality blogs and you can create a quality blog with Wordpress. Also, custom programming or using a good SEO plug-in will help a great deal as well.” Just not as catchy, huh? The reality seldom is…

It’s an SEO Jungle Out There

Ultimately, these myths are just conclusions that are poorly drawn yet highly referenced. It’s understandable how people could draw these conclusions, but they all stem from a lack of SEO fundamentals. As Isaac Newton once said, “We are to admit no more causes of natural search results than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their rankings.” (Well, certainly he would have said that if he was alive today.)