Common SEO Myths (These are UNTRUE)

[midlandi]

Common SEO Myths (These are UNTRUE)

* Outbound links improve your ranking
* Submitting your site to the search engines too many times will get you
banned
* Links from .edu sites are worth more then from other sites
* Pages with .php extensions don't rank as well as pages with .html
extensions
* Search engines won't index pages with query strings/all query strings are
not search engines friendly
* Using seo software gets your site penalized
* Hyphens are not needed to separate keywords in a domain name or URL
* Too many hyphens in your domain name will cause the search engines to
label your site as spam

 

[OldWelshGuy]

* Outbound links improve your ranking
OWG - Outbound links WILL improve your ranking without doubt if you know what you are doing.

* Submitting your site to the search engines too many times will get you
banned.
OWG - Yep, they don't care, but submitting repeatedly to some directories will get you banned.

* Links from .edu sites are worth more then from other sites
OWG - Depends on the content of the page, and it is mixing up cause and effect that has made this myth what it is. These sites tend to have less links, and a more authority status. THIS is what results in increased benefit, NOT the domain extension itself.

* Pages with .php extensions don't rank as well as pages with .html
extensions

OWG - yep again I agree what a load of tosh

* Search engines won't index pages with query strings/all query strings are
not search engines friendly
OWG - It used to be the case they would struggle, but now they pretty much keep going. Avoid more than 3 though, and avoid a set of numbers as this might be misread as a session ID.

* Using seo software gets your site penalized
OWG - This is a tricky one because it depends on the definition of 'SEO software' . Using automated link building SEO software can certainly result in a penalty as it will link to bad neighbourhoods. Generally though stuff like web CEO etc will not get your site banned (although auto querying google WILL get your IP blocked, I can ASSURE you this is 100% true as I have seen it happen with my own eyes. ) This is blocked from using google though NOT the site being blocked.

* Hyphens are not needed to separate keywords in a domain name or URL
OWG - I don't understand what this is stating. (it is a myth that hyphens are not needed in domain names) DMOZ.org has no hyphens, nor does Google.com. If though you are saying that googlemail.com will be seen as one word 'googlemail' where as google-mail.com will be seen as two words 'google' & 'mail' then yep I agree.

* Too many hyphens in your domain name will cause the search engines to
label your site as spam
OWG - This is a grey area here, are you saying 'domain' or url? the-best-cheapest-fastest-acting-v1argra-from-the-number-one-pharmacy.com might not get you banned, but it will CERTAINLY make it easier for the search engines to identify certain sites from their domains

What do you reckon?

 

[midlandi]

I thought that one might get your input OWG!

Nice to see alternative views.
What do the rest of you think?

 

[maxseo]

*

* Search engines won't index pages with query strings/all query strings are
not search engines friendly
OWG - It used to be the case they would struggle, but now they pretty much keep going. Avoid more than 3 though, and avoid a set of numbers as this might be misread as a session ID.

No query strings, check it out.

http://www.google.com/search?q=site:carsearch.net.au&hl=en&lr=&start=90&sa=N

I don't even know why my site gets index so well

...

 

[OldWelshGuy]

Sorry, but I am not sure what you are saying here?

I said... It used to be the case they would struggle, but now they pretty much keep going. Avoid more than 3 though, and avoid a set of numbers as this might be misread as a session ID.

The original writer said MYTHS THAT ARE NOT TRUE.

One thing to note though, your dynamic pages are all supplementals. This could well be because google has a problem spidering them with the normal spider paramaters.

This is taken from the google webmasters cetre

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=34473&query=supplemental+&topic=&type=

What's a "supplemental result?"



A supplemental result is just like a regular web result, except that it's pulled from our supplemental index. We're able to place fewer restraints on sites that we crawl for this supplemental index than we do on sites that are crawled for our main index. For example, the number of parameters in a URL might exclude a site from being crawled for inclusion in our main index; however, it could still be crawled and added to our supplemental index.

Hope this helps a bit...

 

[maxseo]

I see, supplemental results are not as good as pages indexed in the main results.

I didn't know that, what do you advise? stop spiders from crawling dynamic and use some mod_rewrites in .htaccess or leave it as it is ...

 

[OldWelshGuy]

I personally would have them mod rewritten so that they appear as static. but they are already spidered now so it might be iffy to do so unles it is done properly.