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Theo van der Zee (@theovdzee)
CEO & Co-founder, FinishJoomla (@finishjoomla)
Joomla!Day Greece, May 2011
SEO Myths Busted
Theo van der Zee
PageRank
Myths
Linking outUp-to-date
Meta keywords
Suffix
Reciprocal links
Source: http://www.optify.net/seo/organic-click-through-rate/
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
• Number of customers
• Conversion rate
• Daily revenue per item
• Inlinking root domains
• Keywords sending visitors
Myth I: “PageRank is a highly important metric”
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”
“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”
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
http://www.zappos.com/teva-mush-ii-island-navy
http://www.amazon.com/Psychology-Peter-Gray/dp/1429219475/
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/security/
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/evangelizing-a-datadriven-culture
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?
