Debunking SEO Myths: Avoid These Common Traps & Boost Your Rankings

Search engine optimization (SEO) is an art where anybody can dabble in the basics.

It’s difficult (yet, profitable) to master every nuance of SEO and search engine algorithms.

This is why most of the web’s information about SEO is flawed.

Why So Many Myths?

Google’s made the claim that 10,000 signals influence their search results.

For starters, that’s a really difficult thing for anybody to genuinely know. How many lists of 10,000 can you recite from memory?

It’s not just that SEO is difficult. There’s a big machine that churns out SEO misinformation as if it were somebody’s job.

And for some, it kind of is.

Here’s why there are so many SEO myths.

1. The Hustler Economy.

It’s unfortunate, but it’s profitable to propagate SEO myths.

You may have seen stories about the FTC shutting down robodial scams from businesses literally claiming to be Google.

It doesn’t end there. In the age of The Four Hour Work Week, everybody wants everything faster.

The market demands it, so businesses sell this alternate reality as an assortment of SEO products.

In 2019, more business owners lack an understanding of SEO than possess it.

It may not always be this way. But for now, many of the largest SEO ventures remain purposeful misinformation machines.

2. The Telephone Game.

In 2015, MarkingProfs estimated that 2 million blog posts were written daily.

One of the loudest sources of search engine optimization information comes from a few of Google’s own content creators.

Their advice can be helpful. But often, it’s vague and ambiguous.

The copywriters that report on this are rarely professional SEOs.

They misinterpret this information. Other bloggers read and misinterpret that. Sensationalism tends to trump practicality and the advice that reaches the mainstream is rarely useful.

3. The Evolution.

SEO has changed.

Google’s been clear about where they’re headed: they want to reward sites that are naturally the most relevant and popular solution to very specific problems.

Their ranking signals are actually mostly the same.

It’s about words, code, and link building. But they’ve gotten better at managing them.

As such, SEO advice becomes outdated.

For example, there was a time when a link to your store could only either help or be worth nothing. After all, you don’t control who links to you.

Google’s 2013 Penguin update changed that and introduced external link penalties, alongside a manual tool to discredit them.

Debunking The SEO Myths

We know about hundreds of ranking factors. They’re influenced in thousands of ways.

In the same vein, there are hundreds of SEO myths.

I’ve fact-checked hundreds of the most popular myths using primarily patent filings, statements from Google, and the scientific method as evidence.

None of the above are individually perfect. But these tend to be our best sources.

What you’ll find below are high-level myths that are often perpetrated by agencies, brands burned by bad SEO strategy, and the like.

We won’t go deep on meta descriptions, or which search engines to optimize for (Google!), overall digital marketing strategy, bounce rate or click-through rates, or the very bad idea of keyword stuffing.

Instead, here are 10 of the most common and easily-disproven SEO myths.

1. Keyword density greatly improves page ranking.

On one hand, keywords matter.

Using them thoroughly and frequently matters. But chasing an exact percentage of keywords in a page’s text doesn’t.

In extreme cases, it’s harmful.

Two reasons.

First, Google actually told us that they use something called TF-IDF instead.

It stands for Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency. Google talks about this in patent US 7996379 B1 and more elaborately in a 2014 blog post.

All you need to know is that it’s still describing density (frequency). That’s the “TF” part. But, they do this in the context of what’s actually normal compared to the rest of the web.

So, if you ratchet up specific keywords to a level that’s unusual for a topic, or start obsessing about your density of adverbs, Google perceives your site as a manipulative outlier and not a more relevant resource.

Second, Google recognizes synonyms, word stems like “s” and “ing”, and other variations in language. I’d even say this is the one area that they’ve improved most over the years.

In the mid-2000s, it was extremely effective to keep keyword density around 5.5% for most purchase-related phrases.

After about 6%-7%, dependent on the topic (TF-IDF and all), you’d get hit with a penalty and watch that ranking go away entirely.

These tactics no longer work. At least, not simply. Google’s constant work at recognizing natural language patterns is why.

2. Social signals are a ranking factor.

This one’s sticky, so hear me out.

Since the early 2010s, every search engine optimization blog has been slathered in posts about social signals.

These posts theorized that Google was deeply measuring by everything from your number of followers to your poor choice of Instagram filter.

Most of it was wrong then. The few that are still doing it are definitely wrong now.

• In 2010, Google said that this wasn’t a thing.
• In 2012, they said that they were trying it.
• In 2014, they confessed that it didn’t work out and was again not a thing.

For a while, Google+ was a thing.

A concept called “authorship,” where Google tried to figure out who individual content creators were on social media, and track/reward that… that was a thing.

Little “+1” buttons on the results page were even (briefly) a thing.

All gone now.

Google and Twitter have had an on/off relationship with Twitter’s firehose data. And ‘social’ can mean a lot of things.

Mostly, it means links: links to your articles from a social media site and internal links, pointing at those links, when you gain followers, from within those social sites.

We know that backlinks are a ranking factor. We know that social media can have a positive impact, directly and indirectly, on links. But that’s it.

Social media popularity correlates with link popularity, but so does being Kylie Jenner. Being Kylie Jenner is not a ranking factor.

3. Links don’t matter.

Google’s Gary Illyles reminds us 10 times a year that PageRank is still one of the top factors in Google.

PageRank is purely about links and link building. It’s at the core of how Google models popularity.

Unlike content, it’s the one element of Google that’s difficult to game at scale.

It’s not going away.

If doesn’t matter how much artificial intelligence, voice search, or wearables, or whatever else becomes the fashionable SEO topic of the day.

Links are the best input that Google has for understanding how popular something is on the web.

So long as there’s a web, that will be true.

4. Content doesn’t matter.

If links are Google’s best measure of authority, content is our best measure of relevance.

Content (mostly) tells Google what searches to rank your site on. Links (mostly) just tell Google how high to rank it.

I can’t imagine that this is really that controversial, but it’s worth reiterating, because “content is dead” and “links are dead” are still two of the most popular search engine optimization mantras.

Amazingly, at the exact same time.

The reason is pretty simple.

Too many hustlers have a vested interest in telling you that SEO is simpler than it is.

If they’re not good at doing, talking, or writing about content creation, of course, they’re going to try to sell you on links. The reverse is true as well.

5. SEO is a one-time activity.

In my experience, there are two SEO paradigms.

The first, you see most from creative agencies and SEO software vendors.

In this world, SEO is a set of simple best practices. It’s 10 or 20 things that you can get right from a simple, relatively mindless audit.

Look, I get it. That has a place. If SEO is a quick best practice, then sure, do it once and forget about it.

If you’re building a new website, you have to look at it this way. Otherwise, you’re never done and ready to launch.

The truth is, though, that you are never done if you view SEO as a competitive activity.

If 10,000 things impact Google (as we covered), you always have an opportunity.

That’s true until your site is plastered all over page 1 for everything that you could possibly benefit from in the rankings.

This is typically 10s or 100s of thousands of keyword variations.

If somebody ranks better than you in Google, that’s not just the way that it is.

There’s a math equation in play. And you have influence over virtually single every one its variables.