When it comes to Search Engine Optimization there exist nearly as many myths and misinformation about SEO as proven techniques that help you to improve your rankings. What makes it even more complicated is that a lot of the myths cannot be confirmed or disproved, simply because the algorithms of search engines are highly kept secrets and no one knows all the factors that are taken into account when raking a site. After all, the uncertainty about the algorithms does not really support stoppage of the rapid growth of myths that have started to develop over the years, but provides rumors and speculations.
Every once in a while, a new SEO myth pops up either when it is discussed in a forum or published on a blog, but there are some myths that are already so widely spread and seemingly omnipresent in the “SEO-knowledge” of many people so that the vast majority believes them to be true. In the following I will show you some SEO myths that I believe to be wrong. As a side note: this article will not cover the most common SEO myths, such as “trading reciprocal links is great” or “meta tags will improve your ranking”, as these myths are already widely discussed on the internet and already unveiled. This article will focus more on the myths that aren’t that widely discussed.
1. “Nofollow backlinks are useless”
The nofollow tag was introduced by Google in the year 2005, as an attempt to reduce link spam, clearly stating that Google will generally not follow, “transfer PageRank or anchor text across these links” – Google Webmaster Support. Simply put, links that have the nofollow attribute will not pass link juice and won’t help your site getting ranked, which made these links look useless and unimportant in the eyes of many.
However, since the nofollow tag was introduced many things have changed, such as the fact that many authority sites added the nofollow attribution for everyone of their outbound links (e.g. Wikipedia, YouTube and Digg), which slowly but surely made “nofollow” an outdated attribution, that figuratively demanded for a differentiation between what it was in 2005 and today. Google’s response to the increased use of the nofollow attribution, especially from authority sites, was the ineffective appeal to make use of a “less-absolute approach to nofollow”. It hardly changed anything, when looking at these sites we can still see the nofollow attribution for every OBL (outbound link).
I believe that Google, nowadays, has its own indicators if a nofollow backlink comes from an unrelated site via a user generated comment or from a highly relevant backlink with anchor text within the content of a high authority site. That is my opinion, but I believe that Google differentiates in-between these nofollow links, even though nofollow links might not be taken into consideration as a ranking factor.
Search engines like Yahoo! make every link available to their algorithms and their bots will follow these links, no matter if the link has the “nofollow” attribute or not. However, there is no attribution given to the target, if the “nofollow” attribute is present.
The third and most important aspect that nofollow backlinks are not useless at all is the simple fact that these links will still refer real visitors to your site, which might become regular readers or even customers. The importance of an article that went viral on a nofollow site, such as Facebook or Digg shouldn’t be underestimated, as many other websites will start to link to your site as the original source for the information.
In conclusion, nofollow backlinks can benefit your website in form of visitors, even though they might not influence your search engine rankings.
2. “Sites get ranked accordingly to their PageRank”
The PageRank of your domain is negligible, unless you are a professional site flipper that sells websites for a living. Period! What matters is not the PageRank of your site, but how well your site ranks in the search engines. PageRank is an overestimated figure that has lost in importance over the years, when the search algorithms became more advanced and added a lot more very complex ranking factors, such as domain authority and link popularity of specific pages that influence the ranking of a site.
Proof for this theory can be found by doing some searches on Google to see that pages with lower PageRank outrank high PageRank sites pretty often, for given queries. Another fact about PageRank that should be mentioned is that the “official PageRank” you can see on your toolbar is not the real PageRank Google uses in its algorithms. The official one is just an infrequent updated metric (3-4 times a year), that is accordingly to Google “just one of over 200 signals that can affect how your site is crawled, indexed and ranked”. The official PR is not 100% accurate and not the true metric how Google estimates the authority and importance of your site, but it is a good indicator for you.
In conclusion, the PageRank of a site is just one signal besides many others, which affects how a site is ranked. The PageRank of a site that is shown by the toolbar is not exactly the metric Google uses.
3. “Don’t link to other sites! Hoard your PR!”
Many blogger or website owners try to reduce their outgoing links to a slight minimum or do not even link to other sites at all, in fear of passing too much link juice that could decrease their own PageRank. I have made the experience that you should link to other sites that discuss relevant aspects of your articles topic or elaborate one of your arguments more in-depth as you did. Linking to other sites will absolutely not decrease your PageRank and if you do it the right way it will benefit your rankings. The reason for this is as simple as logical:
Google has acquired the status to be the best search engine on the internet. With this status comes the ambition to be perceived by its users as the provider of the best search results that match a given search term as precise as possible, even if the search was inaccurate. Google will prefer sites that offer the best possible user experience. A website that provides exactly the content a user was searching for might not be considered to be the best possible user experience, if this site does not link to its sources or other sites that might be of interest for the user and if there is another site that covers the same topic, but links to other highly relevant authority sites for further recommendation on the topic.
The attempt to hoard all your PageRank by having no outgoing links at all is counter-effective, as it could reduce the user experience and looks simply unnatural to Google. Whenever you create content for your site, try to step into the perspective of your visitor that is searching for specific information’s and include links to external sources, whenever you think a visitor will profit from it. This sort of outside the box thinking approach helps you to view your website from the standpoint of a person that is seeking for as much information on a given topic as possible and helps you to satisfy your visitors, even though you are not completely covering his question.
In conclusion can be said that, linking out to external sites will not sky-rocket your search engine rankings, but it will have some positive effects if you link to relevant authority and quality sites. The only sites you shouldn’t link to are spammy, banned or malicious sites and bad neighborhoods. Furthermore, it is important to make sure not to link to a dozen completely unrelated sites within one article.
Matt Cutts, head of Google’s webspam team addresses this topic as follows: “I wouldn’t recommend closing comments in an attempt to “hoard” your PageRank. 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.”
Every myth is based on personal opinions and so is my attempt to expose the above named myths. No person will ever be able to bust all existing myths on search engine optimization with 100% accuracy, simply because there is no precise knowledge on the way the search engine algorithms operate these days and how much importance the different ranking factors is given.
I would be very interested to hear about your thoughts and experiences about the above named SEO myths, feel free to leave a comment with your point of view.
Steve,
Excellent and clear post. I appreciate the idea of demystifying SEO tactics, as there is a huge volume of misinformation out there. In addition, I love sending out links in my posts. If you think back to school dissertations, you were always required to provide reference material and quotes. So why is it any different in online articles? Thank you again for writing.
Arnold
Arnold, your welcome! Thanks a lot for your great feedback, I really appreciate that! I absolutely agree with you, what many people misunderstand when it comes to PR is that linking to external sites won’t “leak” any of their sites PR… so there is absolutely no reason not to link to another site, when it could be of interest for your readers!
Arnold, your welcome! Thanks a lot for your great feedback, I really appreciate that!
I absolutely agree with you, what many people misunderstand when it comes to PR is that linking to external sites won’t “leak” any of their sites PR… so there is absolutely no reason not to link to another site, when it could be of interest for your readers!
Great job on this Steve. I think in order to make the web a better place people (website owners) need to take a look at the big picture instead of trying to manipulate the search engines. When you are wondering if you will benefit from it you should just ask yourself “does it make a better user experience”… if it does… then DO IT. (Outbound linking, forget about PR)
Thanks Tyler! You’re absolutely right, it all comes down to the user experience and if another website covers something that you just mentioned with one sentence it makes perfect sense to give your readers a link to that source, if they want to read some more about that topic!
I think that these SEO myths are definitely giving up their last gasps. The fact that the idea of “PageRank” and “no-follow links” are only really familiar to SEO specialists in the first place is a good indication that they’re not really applicable to a platform trying to give the best user experience to everyone. (That last part may be pretty arguable, though.) Does the NYT care what its PR is? Nope. Does Random Blogger Y care that the link he got from the HuffPo is a no-follow? Of course not. There’s like this weird Kantian idealism that happens sometimes with SEO where spammers seem to forget that they’re trying to get traffic or referrals or something–not just intangible metrics.
CheetahDeals, I agree with you that the vast majority of people is not familar with the ideas of PageRank and the nofollow attribute. Nevertheless, for those website owners and bloggers that do not have a high reputation like a newspaper (NYT) or a marketing budged that allows them to consult various SEO experts for their websites, it can be quite important.
I felt that especially those who were new to SEO were often confronted with the myths I’ve listed, which is why I thougth it might be helpful for them. ;-) Huge platforms already have their experts who coordinate the SEO of the site.
This is an interesting one, especially when talking about page rank. I always thought it was good to have a high page rank from the off-page seo and then set your page up to compliment this. This does make sense though
Innes, most of the times you cannot influence your site’s off-page seo (besides the known techniques, commenting, writing articles, etc), as you cannot influence who links to your site and if they use dofollow & anchortext, or not.
Some good points here. I’ve been rolling my eyes for years now at the guys who place inflated value on acquiring high PR links. It’s an industry within itself. As you say though, site flippers can still game the system by getting more money for higher PR sites. Even if the value is “in the eye of the beholder”…
Finch, you’re absolutely right! I get a lot of emails every months offering me to sell/trade “highPR” links, but when looking closer these sites are often just linkfarms… but as you said, its an industry within itself.
Thanks for these. I would like to add that no follow sites still have search engine value because they help reflect a more “natural” link building method. Great tips.
Thanks Edward for your addition!
Hey Steve
Great article. Regarding the nofollow/dofollow question, I made a test once with Facebook (nofollow-links), on a new subject on my blog – it wasnt a very competetive niche, but still – after submitting the link with my keyword in the anchor-text, i ranked #1 after two hours, so dont ever tell me that nofollow does’nt work :o) .
Thanks! Interesting experiment… same applies for wikipedia and other nofollow sites, as whenever a visitors with the google toolbar installed follows this link the search-engine spiders will visit that page!
I am not sure that the Google Toolbar is the reason – I am convinced that Google just ignorres the nofollow tag whenever it is a trusted authority site. The same thing applies to DIGG and other social bookmarking sites.
That’s also possible! As Google said about nofollow links: “In general, we don’t follow them”, which leaves a lot room for interpretations and exceptions, such as trusted authority sites (wikipedia, etc.)… definetely agree with you!
Excellent point about reading between the lines with Google’s statement about “generally” not following no follow links. As you mentioned, Google makes a lot of statements like this to be coy and often reading between the lines gives you a lot of insight into what Google really does.
Great list of SEO myths, thanks. I believe that relevance is more important than anything else for google and other SEs. Outbound links will soon carry the same weight as inbound links provided the links are to good quality content that enhances they information or view. Also articles are a great way to add value and at the same time market your business.
CMS, you’re absolutely right! Articles bring also a lot of SE – traffic, so it’s always great to publish some on one’s blog.
Hi Steve!
Your post is Cristal clear and explain in detail in that 3 SEO method. I prefer to to comment in both nofollow and dofollow blogs and I couldn’t find any difference. They both works same way. But Google may punish those whom build links with dofollow attribute blogs only for unusual way of building back-link.
Rammesh, agreed! Google might find it unnatural / suspicious if a site has just dofollow links!
Great Job Steve such a informative Article and also helps to open some close minds of 90′s :P
Thanks Bruce!
links are king
thanks!!! for helping out me resourceful sharing
…..
You’re welcome!
There is no reason not to link to another site where it could be useful to your readers!
Motorcycle Parts
There is an informative post. 3 SEO myths will help me to go forward carefully.
Thanks!
Steve, this is a great post and as usual Matt Cutts drives the point home. Google loves links, I think that’s such as easy concept.
Thanks Christopher!
Related to the nofollow tag: You basically didn’t come with anything new. In conclusion you just reaffirmed google’s official postion that they don’t consider the nofollow tag as a ranking factor. Not much of a “myth busted” if you were to ask me… As far as the remark for the other benefit that of supplying you with visitors – this on is … happy talk.
Hey, Steve, Thanks for this post. Five stars! That’s really a good one! I’ve just realized a couple of important things on this and will definitely apply them right away.
Hi Steve,
Great post and some good points. I think there’s a general acceptance emerging that no-follow is not quite as it sounds. The points that you mentioned about YouTube etc simply add to that argument.
I also agree that linking out will be seen as a positive and not a negative. You just need to look at a bunch of sites that rank well to see that they frequently link to other sites.