SEO Myths Busted

Theo van der Zee, CEO & Co-founder, FinishJoomla

Joomla!dagen Nederland, april 2011

PageRank

Myths

Linking

Up-to-date

KeywordsSuffix

Source: http://www.optify.net/seo/organic-click-through-rate/

“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

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

An imprecise metric

4 5

PR 4 PR 4

“Our PageRank has dropped in the last PageRank update!

Now what?”

“I don’t know, sue Google in court?”

Better metrics than PageRank

• Number of customers

• Conversion rate

• Daily revenue per item

• Inlinking root domains

• Keywords sending visitors

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

“Linking out to other websites is bad”

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/

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:1_rio_de_janeiro_slum_2010.JPG

Source: http://seogadget.co.uk/google-page-penalty-for-comment-spam-rankings-and-traffic-drop/

Spammy comments

Rel=“nofollow”

<a rel=“nofollow” href=“http://www.joomla.org>No link value passed</a>

“Trading links helps boost PageRank and rankings.”

Source: http://www.blog.organicapex.com/reciprocal-link/

Reciprocal links

Anchor text

<a href=“http://www.joomla.org>This is the anchor text</a>

Source: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/10-illustrations-on-search-engines-valuation-of-links

Links in content > Links outside content

“Using a suffix such as .html for your

pages will make them rank better”

.html

http://www.example.org/index.html

.php

.exe

.cgi.asp

What the big boys are doing

http://www.zappos.com/teva-mush-ii-island-navy

http://digg.com/news/business/media/recent

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

“A regularly updated webpage ranks higher in the search engines”

The long tail

Long tail

Short tail

What about you?

“Meta keywords tag boosts your rankings”

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.”

In the Joomla! Administrator

Meta description as shown in Google

Meta title

Meta description

Extract meta keywords from page source

Q & A?

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

Coupon code

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Theo van der Zee

theo@finishjoomla.com

Twitter: @finishjoomla