SEO Myths Busting – What Is Useless In SEO

Search engine optimisation has passed many stages: “naive” search, Wild West-like backlinks spamming, content is king kind of thing, and now it’s all about user-friendly sites.

Most clients don’t really understand what it takes to get a lot of traffic from search, Google algorithms work, what has changed in recent years, why all those terrible sites of competitors are at the top-10 and they are lagging behind on “that one keyword that we must rank for”. 

And the fact that there is no source to answer all these questions with confidence – helps myths and misconceptions to blossom. 

I’d say that that SEO market itself played its role. 

More often than not, small studios with a large number of inexpensive projects in pipeline stream them in this way: specialists do not have time to immerse themselves in a given project, and the owner\manager needs to log something in the time and materials report.

In this article, I have written down some common myths. It’s far away from being a complete list, but I hope it will give you a general idea of what I am talking about.

So, what is useless in SEO?

Technical Audit Section

1. Fixing HTML and CSS validation errors

A myth: errors in the validator\console are bad, we need to immediately fix everything.

Truth. Fixing bugs that show different HTML and CSS validators, without regard to specific layout and programming problems, does not lead to an increase in traffic. 

Also, some errors are not errors at all: validators find them because they sometimes use outdated standards and do not recognize new ones correctly.

2. Removing <frame></frame>

A myth. Iframes and “external” code is bad for the site.

Truth. Content contained in the “iframes” will not be indexed. Is it always bad? No. In some cases, content fragments are specifically closed from indexing. So it is important just to make sure that search bots “see” useful content.

3. Remove “garbage” from the code

A myth. Search engines will think that the site is of poor quality.

Truth. Code cleaning is justified in case of refactoring (i.e. code reworking in order to facilitate further work with the site for programmers) but unless it improves website speed or user experience – it won’t move a needle for ranking. 

4. Prescribe directives in robots.txt for each bot

A myth. Bing will see that we have prescribed instructions specifically for him, and will raise the site in search.

Truth. There is no point in writing directives separately for each bot. User-Agent: * is enough

Exception – if you intentionally want to open or close a section for a strictly defined search engine.

5. Make an HTML page with a site map

A myth. Without it, the site will be not indexed for a long time.

Truth. It is useless for small sites. Search bots will bypass and index your average few hundred pages – without a problem.

6. Transfer CSS styles and scripts to separate files

A myth. Otherwise, the site will be indexed worse.

Truth. If CSS and JS do not interfere with performance (read – website speed), don’t bother – John Mueller from Google confirms.

7. Switch to HTTPS

A myth. Without switching to HTTPS traffic will not grow or decrease as more competitors implement a secure protocol.

Truth. It doesn’t affect traffic, either way, but e-commerce projects may increase conversion to purchase: users trust websites with secure connections.

8. Without a mobile version, the site can be promoted in search

A myth. It’s okay as it is.

Truth. Well, there are niches where the big enough share of users use desktops and mobile traffic is not so important, but there are few of them. So do make your website responsive and traffic will increase due to mobile users, given that you had some traffic before – 100% increase for 10 monthly users from Google is still nothing (unless you sell premium yachts and has a 20% conversion rate, lol)

Internal optimisation

9. Expand the semantic core alone will help

A myth. The more requests, the better.

Truth. You need to be more attentive here. 

First of all, ensure you are allocating enough resources to rank existing pages (given you already have some content and strategy).

Secondly, make sure that optimisers have a clear plan for further action with fresh keywords. The semantics itself will not bring you profit.

If after all, you decide to expand the semantic core – double-check the updated list. These should be excluded:

• keywords with zero frequency – nobody is looking for them;
• low-frequency queries with typos – few people are looking for them, and the search engine will correct the typos anyway and merge (read – show) the proper results anyway;
• single-word keywords, e.g. “SEO” – they require a lot of resources to rank, but don’t convert well because the user intent is not clear;
• branded requests – you are already in the top, most likely.

10. Fill in the Keywords meta tag with key phrases

A myth. Keywords meta tag affects ranking.

Truth. Google does not take into account the content of Keywords. But this is a theory, and what is in practice? There are a lot of sites that are promoted without Keywords, and everything is fine with the traffic there.

11. Change alt attributes, image file names and make a separate sitemap for images

A myth. Otherwise, you won’t see any traffic from the pictures.

Truth. The significant traffic from pictures is a myth.

12. Do internal linking using keywords as anchors

Myth. It will help to gain positions in Google.

Truth. Manipulations with passing “juice” to pages via internal links do not significantly affect the traffic. 

However, internal linking does affect behavioural factors, usability, indexing of pages. Not directly on the traffic.

13. Write and place texts on all pages

A myth. Texts should be E-V-E-R-Y-W-E-R-E. otherwise, there will be no traffic.

Truth. Before enriching the copywriters’ market, it is necessary to analyze the competition per page\cluster basis. 

• Do they have texts on the landing pages? 
• What is the word count? 
• What is the user’s intent? 

In today’s reality, thoughtless and useless “spoilers” of 3,000 characters will get penalties rather than additional traffic. In some niches, the text is not needed at all, or you can do without it well enough anyway.

14. Unique texts in product cards

A myth. It will help to gain positions in Google.

Truth. The same as in the previous paragraph: first look at the competitors. And imagine: there are a lot of shops selling, let’s say iPhones. 

Does the user want to read something “unique” in the product card? No. Give him UTP, acceptable price and do not interfere with the decision to buy.

15. Change the site structure

A myth. If you change the structure of the site, the traffic will increase.

Truth. Not always, but yes, the structure does affect the traffic.

Firstly, in terms of speed of indexing: for example, if an online store has poorly indexed product cards, the change in structure will help accelerate this process.

Secondly, in terms of increasing the entry points to the site. Suppose you have a catalogue page with trousers. Make it a subcategory – by colour, size, fabric composition, etc., and such pages will collect additional traffic.

External optimisation

16. Buy links

A myth. The more links the better, no matter the cost.

Truth. Firstly, this abstract “many” is a direct path to penalty. And then, exactly, do you need a lot? Analyze the links of competitors and budget in on this amount.

For example, we worked with a furniture e-commerce company in the US (chairs & stools) – turned out every huge competitor has links pointing to their home pages. Because of it, category pages like “wooden bar stools” had 0 keyword difficulty:

Secondly, a donor website overall and page-level quality matters big time, but that’s the topic for a few lengthy articles.

17. Get crowdsourced\social links

A myth. It’s a safe link that also brings living people to the site.

Truth. In general, it does but it is damn difficult to find a good outsourcer who is ready to immerse himself in the project, to be responsible for the content and do it all on a cost-efficient budget. 

Links from several directories, imitation of dialogue on “dead” forums and an article on the newly registered Livejournal Account will not add up anything meaningful to your backlink profile. 

Effective crowd marketing is expensive. Perhaps it’s easier to hire someone on staff.

18. Increase in Domain Authority alone will help

A myth. It affects traffic and positions.

True. There is no direct correlation between the growth of Domain Authority and traffic growth – it was validated on many projects. Here is an example of top-10 results for “the matrix explained”

By the way, how did I know? Just a few days ago I published The Matrix Explained & Conspiracy Created on my agency’s blog to do a micro experiment.

To sum it up on SEO Myths

Recently, I came across a checklist for optimization, which ended up like this:

Of course, not all the listed points can have a decisive influence on the ranking, but I didn’t intentionally separate the possible optimization errors by their importance. 

Work on the site comprehensively. At the very least, keep up with your competitors. Or better yet, you should disperse them without dividing them into important and not very important factors. There are 200 ranking factors in Google and the value of each of them can always change.

But for business, it’s a killer. You can’t spend a lot of time and money on scrupulous processing of product cards to make the text 15% more unique until there is no clear certainty that it will bring you profit in the foreseeable future.

Over to you.

Author’s bio: Dmitrii B. is the CEO and founder of GRIN tech – a full-cycle digital agency doing design, marketing, and development alongside white-label agency & media outreach solutions.