7 SEO Myths and the Truths Behind Them

One of the most effective digital marketing techniques for expanding your website’s traffic and sales is search engine optimization (SEO). However, SEO is more difficult to implement than many others.

It’s time-consuming and continuous work, rife with misconceptions and misinformation. Unfortunately, purchasing these preconceptions and developing your strategy around them may result in missed opportunities.

So, let’s look at common SEO myths and debunk them with facts:

1.Google penalty can result from duplicate content.

Duplicate content appears on more than one web page within a website or is duplicated across multiple internet sites.

Many people believe that if your website has duplicate content, Google will penalize it. However, this is not the case.

Google has said on numerous occasions that having duplicate content on your website does not result in a penalty.

Duplicate content, on the other hand, maybe harmful to your website.

Google gets perplexed about which blog post it should rank. In certain circumstances, it may rank pages with low-quality content that is not correctly optimized. It also causes backlink dilution and poor user experience and consumes the crawl budget.

There is no such thing as a duplicate content penalty because Google views all your content as unique. However, duplicate content can damage your website and company in many ways. You can easily find and fix duplicate content using tools like Siteliner for free.

2. Experience the Google Sandbox Effect on New Websites

Many well-known bloggers used to think that there is a special Google algorithm in place to prevent new websites with brand-new domain names from appearing high in Google organic results.

At this point, you may be wondering why your website isn’t at the top of Google for specific keywords. For example, if you have a new website with a new domain name and have published a blog article, you are unlikely to see your post in the top 50 results for that term within a few months.

People call this a sandbox effect.

But Google’s John Mueller said there is no such thing.

The fact that Google doesn’t rank new websites as quickly in search results is due to the fact that it attempts to figure out what they’re all about. Google search engine algorithms, on the other hand, do not readily trust the material of a new website, so they test it a few times and evaluate user experience through click-through rates and dwell time. This is why you see many fluctuations in your Google rankings in the first year or so.

3.Higher Rankings = Longer Content

The notion that the more words there are in your blog article, the higher your search results will be has a certain appeal.

Many bloggers and SEOs recommend producing 3,000- to 4,000-word articles to rank higher on Google and outperform your rivals. And there is plenty of evidence to support this claim.

But this is just a correlation, and not all correlations are causations.

John Mueller said that the total number of words in a blog post is not a ranking factor in a discussion on Twitter.

But let’s think about it for a second.

If you have a query on how long it would take to become a doctor, would you like to read a 3000-word article on Google to get your information? Probably not.

You want to know the time it takes to become a doctor – nothing more, nothing less.

Rather than just focusing on post length, you should consider the number of words based on the topic and query you’re addressing.

Fluff and filler in blog articles have no value for readers, which impacts user experience and hence rankings.

Ensure that all of the information you provide to your audience is highly relevant to what they’re looking for when you target a keyword.

4.More Posts Create More Traffic

The most vital ranking factor, according to many experts, is the quality of material you provide on your site. Material reigns supreme. Is it also confirmed that the more content you have on your blog, the greater your visitors?

Again, not necessarily.

Mueller said on Twitter that more content doesn’t make your website better.

If you want to publish a blog article every day, the quality of your blogs might deteriorate. They become spammy, low-quality blogs with less substance. You can’t expect better Google rankings with publications like these.

Instead, consider publishing many higher-quality articles than numerous low-quality ones. This lowers your crawl budget, prevents link dilution, and improves your website’s authority.

5.Backlinks Are the Key -> Nothing Is More Important Than Backlinks.

Backlinks were formerly a massive part of Google’s ranking process. However, in 2010, when Google primarily relied on backlinks to rank articles, it was the norm. Over time, though, Google has been continuously working to improve its algorithms, releasing one to two minor updates in its search algorithms every day.

So, backlinks are not everything for Google.

Many studies show backlinks as one of the significant factors and not the only thing. And even Google employees admitted that the top three ranking factors in Google are:

• Content
• Backlinks
• Rankbrain

Mueller himself stated that backlinks are not everything in ranking.

Backlinks have decreased in value as Google has improved its understanding of content quality and the meaning of good or bad backlinks based on where they are located, their relevance, and authority.

It is more about building fewer high-quality backlinks than many low-quality, spammy ones.

6.Higher Rankings = More Social Shares.

Many people think that increasing blogs’ social media shares may help them rank better – since many of the top-ranking blogs also have a lot of social media interactions.

But this is another case of correlation and not causation.

Matt Cutts, a former Google employee and software engineer said that the quantity of social shares on a blog post is irrelevant to improving Google rankings because they are readily tampered with.

It’s understandable when you consider it: People may quickly discover bots and artificial intelligence (AI) tools to share blog articles with various IP addresses if social media shares become a ranking component.

That is not to say that social media exposure isn’t valuable. People are interested in learning about your material if they like it and share it on Facebook and Pinterest, which means you may get more exposure.

7.SEO Is Dead

Last but not least, many people believe that SEO is a thing of the past.

However, SEO was never – and never will be – dead.

According to several studies, more than 50 percent of website traffic comes from Google. And according to Ahrefs, more than 68 percent of online experiences start with Google.

SEO, therefore, is very much alive. It’s not only that, but it’s dynamic and ever-changing. As a result, old strategies and tactics that used to work previously may no longer be effective today.

Conclusion

So there you have it: the seven biggest SEO myths debunked. It’s critical to stay up to speed and adjust as needed if you intend to utilize SEO or continue generating traffic for your website