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07.15.08 Distinguishing Good Information From The Bad  By Aaron Wall The SEO market is flush with free information, but many times the free information is factually incorrect, which can cost a lot of money to anyone building a business based on such information. The cost is not immediately readily transparent, but eventually it appears. By the time it does many people who lost money from it may not be aware of what happened, as their attention is already elsewhere. There are a variety of reasons for misinformation to spread • stale search relevancy algorithms that rank old information because it was published on a leading site in 2001 • intellectual laziness, reductionism, and lack of openness to the experience of others • affiliate programs and business models rendered useless by marketplace changes, but still profitable because they can be sold at a low price point and have no real costs associated with them • search engines trying to hide their secret sauce I thought I would give a few examples of commonly spread misinformation. There Was No Ranking #6 Penalty / Filter If you read the comments here you will see how bad I was roasted for suggesting that there was a #6 ranking issue on Google. Matt Cutts stated that he was unaware of such a penalty, and that was the official word until Matt came said they found and fixed the issue.
Where is the harm in that? Well, if you took Google's official word as being accurate, you never had a chance to survey this glitch. Glitches often reveal engineer intent and give you an early warning to make the changes necessary to keep your sites ranking before the new relevancy algorithms launch. Google Does Not Care About Domain Names or TLDs Some people believe that domain names and domain extensions do not matter. After seeing Google temporarily drop .info domain names that was a pretty clear indication to me that they did not think as highly about .info names as they do about some other extensions. For years current and past Google employees have denied that domain names mattered much in the relevancy algorithms, going so far as calling the domain name "a relatively minimal factor" (in 2008 no less). Matt Cutts eventually confirmed that domain names have value at a domainer conference Continue reading this article. About the Author: Aaron Wall is the author of SEO Book, a dynamic website offering marketing tips and coverage of the search space, free SEO videos, and free SEO tools. He is a regular conference speaker, partner in Clientside SEM, and publishes dozens of independent websites. |
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