6 SEO Superstitions
Most SEOs don’t have the time to conduct many of their own tests and rely heavily on the sharing of knowledge with others. Unfortunately, humans are not particularly effective at judging the quality of information and we often adopt techniques and practices without any personal evidence.
Despite any lack of evidence in favour and sometimes despite of strong evidence against, some of these SEO practices remain strong and become superstitions – beliefs or notions, not based on reason or knowledge.
I’ll go into this in more depth in another post but for now, here’s my selection of the top 6 superstitious SEO practices.
- Nofollow link sculpting
Many people swore that they had used this technique to great effect but others denied it. It seemed to make sense and solve some problems so lots of people started doing it. I tried it on some large sites but can’t say it made the slightest bit of difference and it took the debunking from Matt Cutts directly to finally convince a slightly confused and shellshocked SEO industry that they had fooled themselves. The idiots.
- Meta Keywords
I would guess that the vast majority of people in SEO today started long after meta keywords had the slightest impact on traffic. They probably haven’t had any impact in over 5 years as Google has never taken into account. Some people say that it still helps in Yahoo and ‘other’ search engines but I just think they’re a waste of time that could be spent on something we know makes a difference.
- Meta Revisit tag
This is usually the mark of a site optimised by someone without a fundamental grasp of modern site crawling. It shows both a lack of knowledge and naivity about spider control to think that you can increase the rate of crawling with a meta tag. Note that you never see these set to 100 days which is probably a sensible value for most pages that rarely change, it’s always 3 days or something ridiculous. Even though it has no effect, it remains visible evidence as to why a system cannot rely on the trust of those with something to gain.
- Site map
If your site has a good architecture and link structure then a sitemap is unilkely to provide any real benefits and is just another page to soak up precious PageRank without any real value. I’ve no evidence that a site map page has ever helped but I’ve still put them on every site I’ve ever built. There are also recommended for usability purposes but checking the stats of some large UK consumer websites, they get little use.
- Submit to Search Engines
I recently saw a reputable web hosting company offering to ‘submit my site to 400 search engines’ for an additional fee. This sort of behaviour is likely to do more harm than good and it’s the last thing a new website needs. It’s the SEO equivalent of selling poisoned sweets to children. If there was an SEO law it would be illegal.
- Meta Robots All
This tag is one of the strangest things that I see all too often. It specifices a command to the robots with a value of “all” which is supposed to say something along the lines of index the page please. However, it turns out that this works because the value ‘all’ is not a recognised value and is simply ignored and so the search engine uses the default value of index, which it would have done anyway.
