Top 3 SEO Myths Clarified!

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for everyone of their outbound links (e.g. Wikipedia, YouTube and Digg), which slowly but surely made “nofollow” an outdated attribution, that figuratively demanded for a differentiation between what it was in 2005 and today.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. Read more at www.searchenginejournal.com