Yes, you heard right. The holidays are a great time to launch link bait campaigns, because you can piggy-back on the popularity of the holiday and of peoples’ enthusiasm for it. That doesn’t just apply to Christmas/Hanukkah/Kwanza/etc. but also key holidays throughout the year, such as Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, Independence Day, and Halloween. In general, seasonal link baiting makes a lot of sense.

Now let me chronicle for you one of my absolute favorite holiday-themed link bait campaigns, the The Acts of Kindness Advent Calendar from the coaching directory Noomii.com. (Disclosure: Noomii is a client of mine.)

This last minute linkbait campaign idea evolved out of several link bait brainstorming sessions we had. The advent calendar idea itself was hatched on November 30. Now, that’s about as last minute as you can get — Advent started the following day! Talk about JIT (“Just In Time”). Everyone at Noomii sprung into action, even a couple of folks did an all-nighter (OMG those are absolutely awful!) to make the launch date of December 1st.

The idea behind the campaign was simple: unlike most advent calendars which give you a small gift each day leading up to Christmas (such as a toy or candy), this one asks you to perform a daily act of kindness for someone else. The daily acts are quirky and light, and include such tasks as “Be a Secret Santa”, “Give out Five Complements”, and even an indulgent Sunday task entitled “Be Kind to Yourself”.

Noomii did a lot of things right with this campaign in a limited amount of time. For one, the site was built with off-the-shelf tools (WordPress and various free plugins), which means the creators didn’t need to spend a lot of time or money getting it up and running.

The concept is simple and easy to “get” right away. Someone stumbling upon the site will instantly understand the what it’s all about without the need to read the “About” section (the button for which, incidentally, is cleverly labeled “WTF?”, for “What the Fruitcake?”).

The user interface is clean and simple: the home page consists of 25 clickable links superimposed on an image of a typical Christmas scene (that is, if you consider penguins putting up Christmas lights “typical”).

Viral and social elements include the standard social sharing links, a simple email subscription feature, and community forums for sharing stories of daily acts of kindness with other users.

A subtle but clever viral element is the fact that most of the acts of kindness require the user to do something for someone else – often several people. No doubt the creators are hoping the unsuspecting recipients of these acts will do good onto the world and inquire about their origins.

If there had been more time, Noomii would have done an iPhone/iPad/Android app and/or Facebook app. Ah well, next year!

Here are some other notable link bait campaigns I’ve come across this holiday season:

• Should you buy that gift? A flowchart for all your holiday shopping
• Your Guide to Holiday Treats, an infographic from Mrs Fields
• Interflora’s Top 10 Christmas gifts for 2011
• 12 Christmas Decorations for Geeks
• Snowflake Workshop
• 11 Crazy Christmas Trees

So what are your favorite holiday-themed link bait campaigns? Talk back in the comments!

In my opinion, an affiliate-oriented conference like Pubcon or Affiliate Summit is much more up his alley than traditional search marketing conferences like SMX West. Regardless of the conference, the real intel is obtained via networking — especially when booze is involved. No black hat is stupid enough to share their secrets in public.

The black hat SEO believes a healthy dose of paranoia is an essential ingredient to black hat longevity. He thinks trusting Google with your email, documents, or analytics is insane. When he approaches a Google employee to ask a question at a conference, he makes sure his badge is turned over.

The black hat SEO is the king of offshoring. Whether it’s programmers from Russia, Latvia, the Ukraine, or content creators from the Philippines, he knows how to create leverage and do it on the cheap.

In actuality, the life of the black hat SEO isn’t all that glamorous or exciting. He’s not a jetsetter; you won’t bump into him in Monte Carlo. Certainly he’s making a good living, building wealth, and taking care of his family. With that comes a definite sense of satisfaction, comfort and freedom. But he doesn’t see himself as some sort of 007 secret agent.

The black hatter is the ultimate pragmatist. He doesn’t concern himself with the ethics of spamming. He sees Google for what it really is — a global corporation looking to maximize its profits and its return to shareholders. Google Inc. isn’t the government — their “guidelines” are driven by profit motives not by ethics or by the rule of law.

The black hatter focuses on what drives the bottom line. If email spamming drives the bottom line, they’ll very likely partake in that too. And, of course, the focus is on what works. Everything needs to be field tested. You don’t just rely on what somebody’s word.

Cost-benefit analysis underpins all activities. It could be an unsustainable tactic that burns the site to the ground within weeks, and that can be totally fine if the ROI is there. Many of the black hat tactics are short-lived, but yet many work long-term.

What are the tactics of the black hatter? Well, if I told you I’d have to kill you. Seriously though, do you think a black hatter would actually list them all out for me to publish in an article that Googlers are going to read?

Still, several black hatters were accommodating enough to give me a few teasers at least, but careful enough not to give the farm away in the process. Here are a few of their dirty little tricks:

1. Hacking .EDU sites for links: Hiring Russian and Ukrainian hackers to gain access to EDU sites for link building purposes.
2. .EDU alumni account identity theft: Hijacking existing alumni accounts or setting up new alumni accounts by creating fake online personas based on resumes, FaceBook, LinkedIn, and other info gained using social engineering.
3. Aggressive link reclamation (i.e. link hijacking): Identifying noncommercial .COM sites with powerful link profiles that don’t have .ORGs registered, setting up .ORG clones and contacting their link sources asking them to update links from .com to .org, claiming you’ve moved.
4. Building/buying links to competitors: Attacking the competitors trust and authority with bad links — from poisoned link networks, or by building thousands of nasty footer and comment spam links to the competitor’s site with the same optimized anchor text.
5. Gaming Google Suggest: Stacking Google’s search box auto-complete for your competitor names with such unsavory suggestions as “[Competitor name] scam”
6. Submitting fake consumer complaints: Ranting about competitors on Ripoffreport.com — it’s very difficult for the competitor to get these removed.

What follows are innocent mistakes that many SEOs make. Some of these things catch even the best of us…

1.  Google AdWords Keyword Tool Set To Broad Match

The Google AdWords Keyword Tool defaults to “Broad match” mode, which yields useless data from an SEO perspective — useless in that the numbers are hugely inflated to include countless phrases incorporating the search term specified. For example, the Keyword Tool reports 30.4 million queries for “shoes”, but that includes multi-word phrases such as “dress shoes,” “leather shoes,” “high heeled shoes,” and even “horse shoes,” “snow shoes,” and “brake shoes.”

In Exact mode, the search query volume for “shoes” drops to 368,000. The difference between those numbers is striking, isn’t it? So always remember if you are doing keyword research for SEO in the AdWords Keyword Tool: untick the box next to Broad match and tick the box next to Exact.

2.  Disallowing when you meant to Noindex

Ever notice listings in the Google SERPs (search engine results pages) without titles or snippets? That happens when your robots.txt file has disallowed Googlebot from visiting a URL, but Google still knows the URL exists because links were found pointing there. The URL can still rank for terms relevant to the anchor text in links pointing to disallowed pages. A robots.txt Disallow is an instruction to not spider the page content; it’s not an instruction to drop the URL from the index.

If you place a meta robots noindex meta tag on the page, you’ll need to allow the spiders to access the page so it can see the meta tag. Another mistake is to use the URL Removal tool in Google Webmaster Tools instead of simply “noindexing” the page. Rarely (if ever) should the removal tool be used for anything. Also note that there’s a Noindex directive in the REP (Robots Exclusion Protocol) that Googlebot obeys (unofficially). More on disallow and noindex here.

3.  URL SERP Parameters & Google Instant

I just wrote about parameters you can append to Google SERP URLs. I’ve heard folks complain they aren’t able to add parameters to the end of Google SERP URLs anymore — such as &num=100 or &pws=0 — since Google Instant appeared on the scene. Fear not, it’s a simple matter of turning Google Instant off and URL parameters will work again.

4.  Not using your customer’s vocabulary

Your customer doesn’t use industry-speak. They’ve never used the phrase “kitchen electrics” in a sentence, despite the fact that its the industry-accepted term for small kitchen appliances. Your customer may not search in the way you think makes intuitive sense. For example, I would have guessed that the plural “digital cameras” would beat the singular “digital camera” in query volume — yet it’s the other way around according to the various Google tools.

Sometimes it is lawyers being sticklers that gets in the way — such as a bank’s lawyers insisting the term “home loan” be used and never “mortgage” (since technically the latter is a “legal instrument” that the bank does not offer). Many times the right choice is obvious but it’s internal politics or inertia keeping the less popular terminology in place (e.g. “hooded sweatshirt” when “hoodie” is what folks are searching for).

5.  Skipping the keyword brainstorming phase

Too rarely do I hear that the site’s content plan was driven by keyword brainstorming. Keyword brainstorming can be as simplistic as using Google Suggest (which autocompletes as you type and is built into Google.com) or Soovle (which autocompletes simultaneously from from Google, Bing, Yahoo, YouTube, Wikipedia, Amazon, and Answers.com). The idea is to think laterally.

For example, a baby furniture manufacturer discovers the popularity of “baby names” through looking at popular terms starting with “baby” and decides to build out a section of their site dedicated to related terms (“trends in baby names”, “baby name meanings”, “most overused baby names” etc.).

6.  Mapping URLs to keywords, but not the other way around

It’s standard operating procedure to map all one’s site content to keyword themes (sometimes referred to as primary keywords, declared search terms, or gold words.) What’s not so common is to start with a target (i.e. most desired) keyword list and map each keyword to the most appropriate page to rank for that keyword and then optimize the site around the keyword-to-URL pairs.

For example, “vegan restaurants in phoenix” could be relevant to five different pages, but the best candidate is then chosen. The internal linking structure is then optimized to favor that best candidate, i.e. internal links containing that anchor text are pointed to the best candidate rather than spread out across all five. This makes much more sense than competing against oneself and none of the pages winning.

7.  Setting up a free hosted blog

Free hosted blog platforms like WordPress.com and Blogger.com provide a valuable service. Over 18 million blogs are hosted on WordPress.com. They’re just not a service I would sign up for if I cared about SEO or monetization. They aren’t flexible enough to install your own choice of plugins or themes/frameworks to trick out the blog with killer SEO. And for Heaven’s sake, don’t make your blog a subdomain wordpress.com. For $10 per year, you can get a premium WordPress.com account under your own domain name.

Did you know putting AdSense ad units on your WordPress.com blog is against the service’s Terms & Conditions? Much better to get yourself a web host and install the self-hosted version of WordPress so you have full control over the thing.

8.  Not properly disabling Google personalization

Not long ago, Google started personalizing results based on search activity for non logged in users. For those who thought that logging out of Google was sufficient in order to get non-personalized results, I’ve got news for you: it isn’t. Click on “Web History” in the Google SERPs and then “Disable customizations based on search activity”. Or on an individual query you can add &pws=0 to the end of the Google SERP URL (but only if Google Instant is off, see above).

9.   Not logging in to the free tools

Some of the web-based tools we all use regularly, such as Google Trends, either restrict the features or give incomplete (or less accurate) data if not logged in. The Google AdWords Keyword Tool states quite plainly: “Sign in with your AdWords login information to see the full list of ideas for this search”. It would be wise to heed the instruction.

10.  Not linking to your top pages with your top terms on your home page

The categories you display on your home page should be thought through in terms of SEO. Same with your tag cloud if you have one. And the “Popular Products” that you feature. In your mind translate “Popular Products” into “Products for which I most want to get to the top of Google.”

11.  Not returning a 404 status code when you’re supposed to

As I mentioned previously, it’s important to return a 404 status code (rather than a 200 or 301) when the URL being requested is clearly bogus/non-existent. Otherwise, your site will look less trustworthy in the eyes of Google. And yes, Google does check for this.

12. Not building links to pages that link to you

Many amateur SEOs overlook the importance of building links to pages that link to their sites. For commercial sites, it can be tough to get links that point directly to your site. But once you have acquired a great link, it can be a lot easier to build links to that linking page and thus you’ll enjoy the indirect benefit.

13.  Going over the top with copy and/or links meant for the spiders

Countless home pages have paragraphs of what I refer to as “SEO copy” below the footer (i.e. after the copyright statement and legal notices) at the very bottom of the page. Often times they embed numerous keyword-rich text links within that copy. They may even treat each link with bold or strong tags. Can you get any more obvious than that? I suppose if you put an HTML comment immediately preceding that said “spider food for SEO!” (perhaps “Insert keyword spam for Google here” might be more apropos?)

14.  Not using the canonical tag

The canonical tag (errr, link element) may not always work but it certainly doesn’t hurt. So go ahead and use them. Especially if it’s an ecommerce site. For example, if you have a product mapped to multiple categories resulting in multiple URLs, the canonical tag is an easy fix.

15.  Not checking your neighborhood before settling in

If you’re buying a home, you’d check out the area schools and the crime statistics, right? Why wouldn’t you do the same when moving into a new IP neighborhood. Majestic SEO has an IP neighborhood checker. This is especially important for the small-time folks. You don’t want to be on the same IP address (shared hosting) with a bunch of dodgy Cialis sites.

16.  Doing too much internal linking

Don’t water down your link juice so much that only a trickle goes to each of your pages. An article page should flow PageRank to related topics not to everything under the sun (i.e. hundreds of links).

17.  Trusting the data in Google webmaster tools

Ever notice Google Webmaster Tools’ data doesn’t jive with your analytics data? Trust your analytics data over the webmaster tools data.

18.  Submitting your site for public site review at a conference where Google engineers are present

Doh! (Insert Homer Simpson voice here.) Unless you’re absolutely sure you have nothing weird going on within your site or link neighborhood, this is pretty much a suicide mission. Corollary: talking to Matt Cutts at a conference without covering your badge up with business cards. Note this mistake was contributed by a guy we’ll call “Leon” (you know who you are, “Leon”!)

19.  Cannibalizing organic search with PPC

Paying for traffic you would have gotten for free? Yeah that’s gotta hurt. I wrote about this before in Organic Search & Paid Search: Are they Synergistic or Cannibalistic?.

20.  Confusing causation with correlation

When somebody tells me they added H1 tags to their site and it really bumped up their Google rankings, the first question I ask is: “Did you already have the headline text there and just change a font tag into an H1, or did you add keyword-rich headlines that weren’t present before?” It’s usually the latter. The keyword-rich text at the top of the page bumped up the keyword prominence (causation). The H1 tag was a correlation that didn’t move the needle.

21.  Not thinking in terms of your (hypothetical) Google “rap sheet”

You may recall I’ve theorized about this before. Google may not be keeping a “rap sheet” of all your transgressions across your network of sites, but they’d be foolish not to. Submitting your site to 800 spam directories over a span of 3 days is just plain stupid. If it’s easy enough to see a big spike in links in Majestic SEO, then it’s certainly easy enough for Google to spot such anomalies.

22.  Not using a variety of anchor text

That just doesn’t look natural. Think link diversity.

23.  Treating all the links shown in Yahoo Site Explorer as “followed”

Don’t ask me why YSS includes nofollowed links in its reports, but it does. Many YSS users wrongly assume all of the links reported under the “Inlinks” tab are followed links that pass link juice.

24.  Submitting a Reconsideration Request before EVERYTHING has been cleaned up

This may not be “super-common” because many SEOs have never submitted a “Reconsideration request” to Google. But if you have or plan to, then make sure everything — and I mean EVERYTHING — has been cleaned up and you’ve documented this in your submission.

25.  Submitting to the social sites from a non power user account

Nothing goes flat faster than a submission from an unknown user with no history, no followers, no “street cred”. Power users still rule, Digg redesign or not.

Bonus tip: Stop focusing on low- (or no) value activities

Yes I’ll beat on the meta keywords tag yet again. Google never supported it. All it is is free info for your competitors. Guaranteed there are items on your SEO to-do list like this that aren’t worth doing. Be outcome-focused, not activity-focused. Focus on what matters.

Of course this wasn’t an exhaustive list. There are many, many more. I could easily make this a three article series too. I will try to resist the temptation. ;-)

What mistakes are you seeing your co-workers, clients, and competitors make? Share them in the comments!

The operators listed in Part 1 should suffice for most searches. Yet, certain types of searches are most efficiently accomplished by directly modifying the Google SERP URL — for instance, changing the number of results displayed per page, adding omitted results back in, going to the last page of search results, and turning off personalization.

URL parameters are name/value pairs. An equals sign sits between the name and value, and an ampersand separates each pair. These name/value pairs are placed in the “query string” portion of the URL — in other words after the question mark. Assume a base URL of either http://www.google.com/search? or http://google.com/search?. Both will work equally well.

Chart of Google SERP URL parameters

Note that the above is not a comprehensive list of parameters. Some parameters are not usually useful to modify, such as hl (specifies the language used in the Google interface), lr (language restrict; uses standard two-letter language codes), ie (input encoding), and oe (output encoding).

A few more query operators: wildcards, synonyms, NOTs and number ranges

You might recall from Part 1 that quotation marks in a search query signify an exact phrase, and the pipe symbol (|) signifies an OR in Boolean logic. But did you know you can use the tilde operator in front of a word to have Google match on synonyms of that word? For example, ~car repair would also match on auto repair and automotive repair in addition to car repair. Try it and see. You’ll notice all three phrases are bolded KWiC (keywords in context) in the search listings that are returned.

A minus sign directly in front of a word acts like NOT in Boolean logic, eliminating from the search results the subsequent word or quote-encapsulated exact phrase. For example, confidential business plan -template will only return results where the word “template” is not present in the page.

To specify a numerical range, use two dots between two numbers, which could be years, dollar amounts, or any other numerical value. For example, confidential business plan 2007..2010 will find documents that mention 2007 or 2008 or 2009 or 2010.

Another favorite operator is the wildcard, i.e. the asterisk character. It can substitute for a whole word in an exact phrase search. Imagine that you can’t remember the exact words of an expression; you’d simply substitute asterisks for the words you can’t recall.

For instance, “* of my * have been greatly exaggerated” — is it supposed to be “news,” “announcements,” or “rumors” in the first slot? “death” or “demise” in the second slot?

Let’s put what we’ve learned so far in Parts 1 & 2 about Google operators and URL parameters to some practical use…

Estimated number of results

The estimated number of results is just that: an estimate. And a wildly inaccurate estimate at that. You can often get a more accurate count of results than this estimate by going to the last page of results and clicking the link to “repeat the search with the omitted results included.” A shortcut to this is to append &start=990&filter=0 to the end of the SERP URL.

For example, searching Google for site:redenvelope.com returns “about 5,010 results,” but appending &start=990&filter=0 to the end of that SERP URL takes us only as far out as page 84. So the true indexation number is 836. That’s a far cry from 5,010!

Google won’t let you go beyond the 1000th result, so if you are checking indexation and it goes to page 100, then you’re at the end of the line and can’t see beyond that. In these situations, you can work around the limit by looking at just a subset of the site by using the site: and inurl: operators. For example, site:www.example.com/articles/ will return only pages in the articles directory of this hypothetical site. The site: operator used in conjunction with inurl: allows you to refine your search even further, for example: site:www.example.com/articles inurl:print-friendly.

Finding sites to link to you

Finding folks who are inclined to link to your site is a common task in SEO, but it’s a laborious and painful one — IF you aren’t a Google power user. It’s like looking for a needle in a haystack.

Try this trick: get Google to return a list of targets that are topically relevant and that already include attribution links to their web developer or web host. Like so: site:edu | site:gov [some industry] intext:”website * by”.

In this example query, we’re limiting results to .edu and .gov sites that have content related to a certain unspecified industry / keyword market and that have an attribution such as “Website developed by” or “Website marketing by” or “Website hosting by” somewhere on the page. The thinking is that such site owners would be more predisposed to include other attribution links to in-kind donors/sponsors.

Monitoring inbound links

Want to see which competitors are successful in acquiring keyword-rich text links that specify your targeted search term? It’s easy with the inanchor: and allinanchor: operators. For example, inanchor:”neopets cheats” will return pages that have garnered links with “neopets cheats” in the anchor text (there’s my daughter’s site at #3!).

Host crowding

On a page of results, Google will group listings from the same site together. Googlers refer to this as “host crowding.” Recently Google started showing more than two listings per page in certain (relatively rare) circumstances, all host crowded. It can be really useful to determine the true (original) position of an indented (host crowded) listing.

If you customize the SERPs to 9 results per page using the num=9 parameter, and then consequently the indented result disappears, that meant the indented result was actually at position #10 and was merely visually promoted to appear at a higher position.

With that information, you could target other listings on page 2 to promote to page 1. It would take only one new listing added to page 1 to displace your competitor’s indented listing. More on this in my previous article Deconstructing Grouped Google Results.

Keyword competitiveness

I never liked the KEI (keyword effectiveness indicator) score as a metric for keyword competition. For one, the denominator is based on a number (the “estimated number of results”) that, as already discussed, is completely bogus. Besides, how well does that number correlate to ranking difficulty anyways — even if it were accurate?

A better way to gauge the competition for a particular keyword is to compare searches for the keyword you are targeting, then the exact phrase version of the term (in quotes), then that exact phrase (in quotes) within the title tag. It’s the last one that really represents your true competition.

After all, if they didn’t specify that exact phrase in any of their title tags, how seriously were they going after that search term anyways? Consider white noise at about 11,400,000 results, versus “white noise” at about 3,120,000 results, versus intitle:”white noise” at about 79,100 results. The serious competition is represented by the 79,100 number, not the 11.4 million.

For Part 1 of this series, I’m going to focus on the various commands:  the search operators, also known as query operators — for the search box to restrict your results or to otherwise pull the needle from the proverbial haystack. If you’re an SEO practitioner, you surely know and use a number of these. Ah, but do you know them all…?

Google operators are case-sensitive, so be sure to use all lowercase letters (the iPhone’s Web browser will try to capitalize the first letter of every sentence, so make sure you go back and correct it before executing your query.)

Here’s my Top Ten list (well, more like 20+) of Google Query Operators:

Query Operator explanations

filetype:

You can restrict your search to Word documents, to Excel documents, to PDF files, or to PowerPoint files by adding filetype:doc, filetype:xls, filetype:pdf, or filetype:ppt, respectively, to your search query.

Want a great PowerPoint presentation on SEO best practices that you can re-purpose for a meeting? Simply query Google for seo best practices filetype:ppt. Need a marketing plan template? Since the template would most likely be a Word document, cut through the Web page clutter with a search of marketing plan template filetype:doc.

Side note: Don’t link to your own marketing plans if you don’t want them showing up in Google’s index.

In fact, Google allows any extension to be entered in conjunction with the filetype: operator, including htm, txt, php, asp, jsp, swf, etc. Google then matches on your desired extension after the filename in the URL. Note that there is no space after the colon when using this operator. You can use ext: instead of filetype: — they work exactly the same.

site:

You can search within a site or a domain by adding the site: operator followed by a site’s domain name to your query. For example, you could search for me (Stephan Spencer) but restrict your search to only pages within the Covario.com site with a query of stephan spencer site:www.covario.com.

You can also add a subdirectory to the end of the domain in a site: query. For example seo site:www.covario.com/what-we-do/.

To conduct a comprehensive search of all of the associated subdomains of a domain, omit the www and instead specify only the main domain. For example, a search for site:yahoo.com would encompass not just www.yahoo.com, but also movies.yahoo.com, travel.yahoo.com, personals.yahoo.com and so forth. The site: search operator works even when just the domain extension (like .com, .org, .gov, or .co.uk) is specified. Thus, you can restrict your search to .com sites with site:com, to .gov sites with site:gov, or to .co.uk with site:co.uk.

Combining Boolean logic with the site: operator will allow you to search within multiple sites simultaneously. For instance, search marketing (site:marketingprofs.com | site:marketingsherpa.com | site:marketingpower.com) searches the three sites simultaneously.

Use the site: operator by itself without other search words to get a list of all pages indexed, such as site:actionableinsights.covario.com. Again, note that there is no space after the colon when using this operator.

inurl:

Use the inurl: operator to restrict the search results to pages that contain a particular word in the URL.

This can be especially useful if you want Google to display all the pages it has found with a particular script name, such as inurl:ToolPage site:www.vfinance.com. Again, there is no space after the colon when using this operator.

allinurl:

This operator is similar in function to the inurl: operator but is used for finding multiple words in the URL. It eliminates the need to keep repeating inurl: in front of every word you want to search for in the URL.

For instance, allinurl: china exporting is an equivalent and more concise form of the query inurl:china inurl:exporting to find Web pages that contain the words china and exporting anywhere in the URL, including the filename, directory names, extension, or domain. There IS a space after the colon when using the allinurl: operator.

intext:

Searches for a word in the main body text. This is used in a similar fashion to inurl:.

allintext:

Searches for multiple words within the body text of indexed pages. This is used in a similar fashion to allinurl:.

intitle:

Use the intitle: operator (such as intitle:marketing) to look for documents where your specified word or phrase matches in the page title.

If you want to find Microsoft Word documents in which the document title (located within Properties under the File menu in Word) includes the phrase “marketing plan,” you would use the query intitle:”marketing plan” filetype:doc. Follow the intitle: operator with a word or a phrase in quotes, without a space after the colon.

allintitle:

This works like intitle: but searches for multiple words in the title. For instance, use allintitle: channel conflict online retail to search for documents that contain all four of those words in the title. Note that there is a space after the colon when using this operator.

inanchor:

The inanchor: operator will restrict your search to pages where the underlined text of inbound links matches your search word. For example, if you wanted to search for HTML site maps but confine your search to those pages with links that say “site map”, inanchor:”site map” would do the trick, since most sites link to their own site maps using the link text of “Site Map.”

Follow the inanchor: operator with a word or a phrase in quotes, without a space after the colon.

allinanchor:

This works like inanchor: but searches for multiple words in the anchor text. For example, the query seo tool allinanchor: download trial would invoke a search for pages relating to SEO tools that have the words download and trial in the anchor text.

Note that there is a space after the colon when using this operator.

daterange:

The daterange: operator restricts the search results to pages added or updated within the specified date range. It only accepts Julian dates, which makes it less user-friendly than it could be. You can find Gregorian-to-Julian date converters online, e.g. here.

You’ll almost certainly find it easier just to do your search first without a date range, then use the custom date range options in the “More search tools” area of the resulting SERP.

related:

“Related” queries show pages that are similar to the specified Web page. Follow this operator with a Web address, such as related:www.netconcepts.com, and you would find Web pages that are related to the Netconcepts.com home page.

info:

An info: query lets you know whether the specified page is known by Google, and it provides the title and a snippet (if available), a link to the page, a link to a cached version of the page (see below for an explanation of this), and a link to view pages that link to the specified page.

Supply a Web address after this operator, such as info:www.covario.com.

link:

The link: operator displays a sampling of pages that link to the specified Web page. Follow this operator with a Web address, such as link:www.covario.com to find pages that link to the Covario home page. Google does not support appending further refinements onto this operator such as excluding links within the same site.

cache:

The cache: operator provides a snapshot view of a Web page as it looked when Googlebot last visited the page. Follow this operator with a Web address, such as cache:www.covario.com to view the page that Google has cached. Note that Googlebot must have downloaded the page in order for this to work.

define:

This is a useful operator for quickly obtaining several definitions from various online glossaries. Curious about the definition of “tipping point”? Simply type in define: tipping point into Google.

stocks:

Wondering how your competitor is performing on Wall Street? Enter this operator followed by a ticker symbol to retrieve financial information, including latest stock quotes from Google Finance.

phonebook:

Google offers an online residential phone directory look-up. Simply follow this operator with a name and location (full street address, or just city and state, or ZIP code), or a phone number for a reverse number look-up.

{area code}

Google also offers an area code look-up. For example, enter 313 and Google returns the geographic location and map corresponding to that area code.

{street address}

Queries in the format of a street address automatically return street maps. Enter a full street address, or a ZIP code, or a city and state. For example, 123 east main street, madison, wi or 53703 or madison, wi are all valid map-based Google searches.

{mathematical expression}

Enter any valid mathematical expression, and Google’s calculator function will interpret it for you. It will even do measurement conversions for you, such as 8 ounces in cups. Learn more about what other syntax is valid at the Google calculator page.

“But, wait, there’s more!”

As you now know, in addition to combing through triillions of URLs the amazingly versatile Google can double as a calculator, measurement converter, phonebook, dictionary, street map atlas and stock ticker.

Enter a valid package tracking ID into Google and you can also track packages. Or, supply an airline and flight number to Google, and it will return flight times. Google will even return information about a car’s history if you query it with the VIN (vehicle information number.)

In fact, Google will spit back all sorts of interesting information when it recognizes a particular number format, such as a patent number, FAA airplane registration number, UPC Codes or FCC Equipment ID.

In Part 2, I’ll be back with more Google power user tips and tricks, including parameters that you can append to the URL of the Google SERPs for really handy SEO diagnostics and forensic analysis.

Best Practices

Implementing the 14 best practices below (or at least some of them) and avoiding the worst practices should offer you a straightforward approach to better visibility in search engines, including Google, Yahoo!, and Bing.

Best and Worst Practice Explanations

Curious about the importance or relevance of some of the questions on the checklists? Read on for full descriptions of the implications of these questions.

Best Practices Explanations

1. Are the keywords that you are targeting not only relevant but also popular with searchers? There is no point going after high rankings for keywords that no one searches for. Compare relative popularity of keywords using Google’s free tools (Google AdWords Keyword Tool and Google Insights for Search) and/or paid tools like KeywordDiscovery.com and WordTracker.com before deciding what keywords to employ on your Web pages.
   
   Despite the popularity of individual words, it’s best to target two- or three-word phrases (or even longer). Because of the staggering number of Web pages indexed by the major search engines, competing for a spot on the first or second page of search results on a one-word keyword will typically be a losing battle (unless you have killer link authority). This should go without saying, but the keywords you select should be relevant to your business.




2. Do your page titles lead with your targeted keywords? The text within your page title (a.k.a. the title tag) is given more weight by the search engines than any other text on the page. The keywords at the beginning of the title tag are given the most weight. Thus, by leading with keywords that you’ve chosen carefully, you make your page appear more relevant to those keywords in a search.




3. Is your body copy of sufficient length and keyword-rich?Ideally, incorporate at least several hundred words on each page so there’s enough “meat” there for the search engines to sink their teeth into and determine a keyword theme of the page. Include relevant keywords high up in the page, where they will be weighted more heavily by the search engines than keywords mentioned only at the bottom of the page, where it’s almost like an afterthought. This is known as keyword prominence. Think in terms of keyword prominence in the HTML, not the rendered page on the screen; Google doesn’t realize that something is at the top of the third column if it appears low in the HTML. Be careful not to go overboard to the point that your copy doesn’t read well; that’s called “keyword stuffing” and is discussed later, under “Worst Practices.”




4. Does the anchor text pointing to various pages within your site include good keywords? Google, Yahoo, and Bing all associate the anchor text in the hyperlink as highly relevant to the page being linked to. So, use good keywords in the anchor text to help the engine better ascertain the theme of the page you are linking to. Keep the link text relatively succinct and tightly focused on just one keyword or key phrase. The longer the anchor text, the more diluted the overall theme conveyed to the engine.




5. Do you employ text links from your home page to your most important secondary pages? Text links are, by far, the better option over ALT attributes in conveying to the search engine the context of the page to which you are linking. (An ALT attribute is the text that appears in a small box when you hover your cursor over an image.) ALT attributes can have an effect, but it’s small in comparison with that of text links. If you have graphical navigation buttons, switch them to keyword-rich text links; if that’s not an option, at least include text link navigation repeated elsewhere on the page, such as in the footer (note however that footer links are partially devalued), or consider the CSS image replacement technique, described below.




6. If you must have graphical navigation, do you use the CSS image replacement technique as a workaround, and do those graphics have descriptive and keyword-rich ALT attributes that are useful for both humans and search engines? Image Replacement is a technique that employs CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) to substitute in replacement copy and HTML – such as a text link or heading tag – when the stylesheet is not loaded (as is the case when the search engine spiders come to visit.) The text-based replacement is weighted more heavily by the engines than the IMG ALT attribute — thus it is preferable to relying solely on the ALT attribute. Of the many ways to implement the image replacement technique, most use CSS to physically move the text off the screen (text-indent: -9999em; left:-9999em;display:none, etc), which is not ideal because the search engines may discount this as hidden text.
   
   Important: resist the temptation to work in additional keywords or text into the text replacement, or your site may be hit with a penalty. A few CSS image replacement methods exist that are preferable because they don’t physically move the content off-page and are still accessible, namely The Leahy/Langridge Method, The Gilder/Levin Method and The ‘Shea Enhancement’. It is still useful to have ALT attributes on your images, more for usability/accessibility than for SEO. ALT attributes should contain relevant keywords that convey the key information from the image that the user would not receive if she had image loading turned off.




7. Does your Web site have an XML Sitemap, as well as an HTML site map with text links? An XML Sitemap file provides the search engines with a comprehensive list of all the URLs corresponding to the pages/documents which are contained on your website. This helps ensure all of your pages end up getting indexed by the search engines. But the XML Sitemap is more than just a list of URLs; it can include additional information about each URL, such as the page’s last modified date and priority (which can impact how frequently the page is visited by the search engine spiders and thus how quickly it is refreshed.)
   
   It’s abest practice to also include the location of your sitemap file(s) in your site’s robots.txt, so that the search engines can “autodiscover” the sitemaps on their own without you having to specify the location of the file(s) in each search engine’s Webmaster Center. An HTML sitemap is a different thing altogether. It’s simply a page on your website with links to all your important pages, displayed usually in a hierarchical fashion. A link to the sitemap is typically present in the footer of every page of the site.
   
   HTML sitemaps have long been touted as good “spider food” because it provides the search engine spiders with a links to key pages to explore and index. Use text links, since they are more search engine optimal than graphical links, as already mentioned. Bear in mind that you should ideally try to stay within 100 links per page, as a recommended best practice by Google (this is a rough guideline, not a hard and fast rule). That may mean breaking up your site map into multiple HTML pages.




8. Are the URLs of your dynamic (database-driven) pages short, simple and static-looking? Pages with URLs that contain a question mark and numerous ampersands and equals signs aren’t as palatable to the search engines as simple, static-looking URLs. Either install a server module/plug-in that allows you to “rewrite” your URLs, or recode your site to embed your variables in the path info instead of the query string; or, if you need to minimize resource requirements by your IT team, you can enlist a “proxy serving” solution such as Organic Search Optimizer.
   
   I’ve written about this at length in this two-part article. Another, oft-neglected aspect of URL optimization is making them short for improved click-through from the search results. In my previous article on URL optimization I discussed an interesting study by MarketingSherpa that found that short URLs get clicked on twice as often as long URLs in the Google SERPs.




9. Does your home page and other key pages of your site have sufficient PageRank (link authority)? PageRank is Google’s way of quantifying the importance of a Web page. Put another way, it’s as much about the quality of the links pointing to a given Web page as it is about the quantity (more so, actually). PageRank has been the cornerstone for Google’s ranking algorithm since the beginning. The more important (PageRank-endowed) pages wield more voting power; the page’s “vote” gets divvied up among all the links on the page and passed on to those pages.
   
   Of course, this is a massive over-simplification, and the PageRank algorithm has evolved over the years to include such things as trust and authority to stay ahead of the spammers. Nonetheless, a form of PageRank is still in use today by Google. You can check Google PageRank scores using the Google Toolbar. Mouse over the toolbar’s PageRank meter to display the numerical rating, an integer value between 0 and 10. Yahoo’s importance-scoring equivalent to PageRank has been referred to internally as both LinkFlux and Yahoo! Web Rank at various times. It’s best to refer to the PageRank-like algorithms of the three major engines more generally as “link authority,” “link equity,” or “link juice”.The PageRank scores delivered by Google’s toolbar server are on a logarithmic scale; meaning that integer increments are not evenly spaced. Thus, garnering more links and gaining in PageRank score from 3 to 4 is easy, but from 6 to 7 is a lot harder.
   
   Also bear in mind that the PageRank displayed in the Google Toolbar is not the same PageRank as what is used by Google’s ranking algorithm. In fact, the correlation between the two PageRanks has degraded over time. Potentially a better predictor of your true PageRank score is the “mozRank” score available from Linkscape. “mozRank” approximates Google PageRank using a sophisticated algorithm and an index of 30+ billion pages. mozRank scores are also on a logarithmic scale. A PageRank or mozRank score for your home page of 7 or 8 is a laudable goal.Note that each page has its own PageRank score. Because most of the inbound links your site has garnered point to the home page, your home page almost invariably ends up being the highest PageRank-endowed page of your site. The PageRank that has accumulated on your home page is passed to your internal pages through your internal linking structure.

   Bottom line: if a given page on your site doesn’t have enough PageRank (I’m referring to the super-secret, internal PageRank that Google doesn’t share with us SEOs via the Toolbar), then it doesn’t deserve to rank.




10. Does your site have an optimized internal linking structure? Your site’s hierarchical internal linking structure conveys to the search engines how important you consider each page of your site, comparatively. This of course impacts these pages’ PageRank scores and ultimately their Google rankings. The deeper down a page is in the site tree (i.e. the more clicks away the page in question is from the home page), the less PageRank with which that page will be endowed.
    
    Therefore, it’s critical you think carefully about how you spend that hard-earned PageRank, i.e. where and how you link from your home page and from your site-wide navigation to the rest of your site.Generally speaking, the deeper in your hierarchy you hide key content, the less important that content appears to the search engines — if they even find it (which is not a given if it’s very deep). As an aside, this concept applies not only to your linking structure but also to your URL structure: too many slashes in the URL (i.e. too many sub-directories deep) and you convey to the engines that the page is unimportant. A flat directory structure, where you minimize the number of slashes in the URL, helps ensure more pages of your site get indexed.




11. Do your pages have keyword-rich meta descriptions with a compelling call to action? Because meta tags are tucked away in the HTML and hidden from the view of the human visitor, they have been abused like crazy by spammers trying to hide keywords out of view. The original purpose of meta tags was to provide meta-information about the page which could then be used by search engine spiders and other algorithms. One such piece of meta-information is a description of the page (e.g., its content and its purpose), a.k.a. the “meta description”. Although it won’t improve your rankings to define a meta description (or meta keywords or any other meta tag, for that matter), it is useful from the standpoint of influencing what text appears within your listing in the search results (i.e. the “snippet”), in order to better persuade the user to click through to your site.
    
    Yahoo will frequently employ the meta description as the description in your search results listing. Bing is also displaying the meta descriptions in the search listings. Google may incorporate some or all of your meta description in to the snippet displayed in your search listing; it’s more likely if the searcher’s keywords are present in your meta description. More on the intricacies on Google snippets here. The user’s search terms, and related keywords, like those with the same root – are bolded in the search listing, which improves the clickthrough rate to your page (from the search results). This is known as KWiC (KeyWords in Context).




12. Does your site have a custom error page that returns the correct “status code”? Don’t greet users with the default “File not found” error page when they click through from a search engine results page to a page on your site that no longer exists. Offer a custom error page instead, with your logo and branding, navigation, site map, and search box. Important from an SEO standpoint – make sure that “File not found” error page returns in the HTTP header a “status code” of 404 (or potentially a different 400 or 500 level status code depending on the nature of the error), or it 301 redirects to a URL that returns a 404. You can check this with a server header checker, such as this one. If you send a mistakenly send a 200 status code instead, this error page will likely end up in the index, and thus the search results. This is discussed further in the “Worst Practices.” No matter what the reason for the page’s unavailability (e.g., discontinued product, site redesign, file renamed, server or database issues), you shouldn’t be driving visitors away with an ugly error page that doesn’t provide a path to your home page and other key areas of your site.




13. Do your filenames and directory names include targeted keywords? Google engineer Matt Cutts has blogged that this is a useful “signal” to Google, so if it’s easy to do, why not? Separate keywords with hyphens, not with underscores. Avoid having more than a few keywords into a filename or directory name, as it could look spammy to the search engines.




14. Are you actively building links to your site? A steady stream of high quality links don’t just “happen”; just like ongoing, consistently great media coverage doesn’t just “happen.” If it did, link builders and public relations pros would all be out of a job.The most basic of starting points for link building is the authoritative directories like the Yahoo Directory and the Open Directory. Not only do the high quality directories improve your PageRank and consequently your rankings; they also drive direct click-through traffic. If you aren’t already listed in the Yahoo Directory or Open Directory then you should identify the category most relevant to your business and submit your site. A listing in Open Directory also ensures a listing in the (largely forgotten) Google Directory and numerous other directories powered by Open Directory.
    
    Submitting to Yahoo’s directory costs $299 then $299 per year recurring (it’s free for noncommercial sites, though.) Submitting to Open Directory is free but it’s become practically impossible to get into, at least in the most appropriate category for your site, since the Open Directory’s owner (AOL) and its volunteer editors have left the Directory semi-abandoned. Don’t waste your time and money submitting to hundreds of directories, just pick the most critical ones that are relevant to your business/industry and that Google would likely consider authoritative and trustworthy.
    
    For example, a business-to-business company may wish to submit to business.com and ThomasNet.com. Directories that primarily target webmasters and SEOs to sell them listings, rather than end users who would actually browse the directory, are most likely being devalued by Google and thus would be a waste of your time and money to submit to.
    
    What’s next after the directories? I can’t get into that or this already overly long article would quickly become a book! There’s an entire Search Engine Land column dedicated to this important topic: Link Week. Suffice it to say that within link building lies quite a spectrum of tactics, from the more basic like optimized press releases, article syndication, and guest blogging to the more advanced like consistently hitting the Digg.com front page with killer link bait. Diversify your link building tactics like you diversify your investment portfolio. Don’t just rely on one tactic.

That’s where these checklists come in. They are designed for web marketers and web developers so that they can easily understand SEO and start tackling it. You can read a full description of each best and worst practice at the end of this, after the two checklists.

Worst practices in SEO

Partially indexed, poorly ranked, penalized and possibly banned: such is the unpleasant fate of a website that’s not duly optimized for search engines. Even if you mastered all “best practices”, your site may not be safe.

The mission of search engines is to supply their visitors with relevant results, so penalizing or banning sites that appear to interfere with that mission is a necessity. Understanding which practices adversely impact your search engine rankings is a prerequisite to a well-optimized site.

Whether inadvertent or not, any of the following worst practices could doom your site to suboptimal traffic levels. Here are 29 critical “must nots” in SEO (this is not a comprehensive list, by the way):

Worst practices explained

1. Do you use pull-down boxes for navigation? Search engine spiders can’t fill out forms, even short ones with just one pull-down. Thus, they can’t get to the pages that follow. If you’re using pull-downs, make sure there is an alternate means of navigating to those pages that the spiders can use. Note this is not the same as a mouseover menu, where sub-choices show up upon hovering over the main navigation bar; that’s fine if done using CSS (rather than Javascript.)
2. Does your primary navigation require Flash, Java or Javascript? If you rely on search engine spiders executing Flash, Java or Javascript code in order to access links to deeper pages within your site, you’re taking a big risk. The search engines have a limited ability to deal with Flash, Java and Javascript. So the links may not be accessible to the spiders, or the link text may not get associated with the link. Semantically marked up HTML is always the most search engine friendly way to go.
3. Is your site done entirely in Flash or overly graphical with very little textual content? Text is always better than graphics or Flash animations for search engine rankings. Page titles and section headings should be text, not graphics. The main textual content of the page should ideally not be embedded within Flash. If it is, then have an alternative text version within div tags and use SWFObject to determine whether that text is displayed based on whether the visitor has the Flash plugin installed.
4. Is your home page a “splash page” or otherwise content-less? With most webites, as mentioned above, the home page is weighted by the search engines as the most important page on the site (i.e., given the highest PageRank score.) Thus, having no keyword-rich content on your home page is a missed opportunity.
5. Does your site employ frames? Search engines have problems crawling sites that use frames (i.e., where part of the page moves when you scroll but other parts stay stationary.) Google advises not using frames: “Frames tend to cause problems with search engines, bookmarks, emailing links and so on, because frames don’t fit the conceptual model of the Web (every page corresponds to a single URL.) “Furthermore, if a frame does get indexed, searchers clicking through to it from search results will often find an “orphaned page”: a frame without the content it framed, or content without the associated navigation links in the frame it was intended to display with. Often, they will simply find an error page.What about “iFrames”, you ask? iFrames are better than frames for a variety of reasons, but the content within an iframe on a page still won’t be indexed as part of that page’s content.
6. Do the URLs of your pages Include “cgi-bin” or numerous ampersands? As discussed, search engines are leery of dynamically generated pages. That’s because they can lead the search spider into an infinite loop called a “spider trap.” Certain characters (question marks, ampersands, equal signs) and “cgi-bin” in the URL are sure-fire tip-offs to the search engines that the page is dynamic and thus to proceed with caution. If the URLs have long, overly complex “query strings” (the part of the URL after the question mark), with a number of ampersands and equals signs (which signify that there are multiple variables in the query string), then your page is less likely to get included in the search engine’s index.
7. Do the URLs of your pages include session IDs or user IDs? If your answer to this question is yes, then consider this: search engine spiders like Googlebot don’t support cookies, and thus the spider will be assigned a new session ID or user ID on each page on your site that it visits. This is the proverbial “spider trap” waiting to happen. Search engine spiders may just skip over these pages. If such pages do get indexed, there will be multiple copies of the same pages each taking a share of the PageRank score, resulting in PageRank dilution and lowered rankings.If you’re not quite clear on why your PageRank scores will be diluted, think of it this way: Googlebot will find minimal links pointing to the exact version of a page with a particular session ID in its URL.
8. Do you unnecessarily spread your site across multiple domains? This is typically done for load balancing purposes. For example, the links on the JCPenney.com home page point off to www2.jcpenney.com, or www3.jcpenney.com, or www4.jcpenney.com and so on, depending on which server is the least busy. This dilutes PageRank in a way similar to how session IDs in the URL dilute PageRank.
9. Are your title tags the same on all pages? Far too many websites use a single title tag for the entire site. If your site falls into that group, you’re missing out on a lot of search engine traffic. Each page of your site should “sing” for one or several unique keyword themes. That “singing” is stifled when the page’s title tag doesn’t incorporate the particular keyword being targeted.
10. Do you have pop-ups on your site? Most search engines don’t index Javascript-based pop-ups, so the content within the pop-up will not get indexed. If that’s not good enough reason to stop using pop-ups, you should know that people hate them – with a passion. Also consider that untold millions of users have pop-up blockers installed. (The Google Toolbar and Yahoo Companion toolbar are pop-up blockers, too, in case you didn’t know.)
11. Do you have error pages in the search results (“session expired” etc.)? First impressions count . . . a lot! So make sure search engine users aren’t seeing error messages in your search listings. Hotmail took the cake in this regard, with a Google listing for its home page that, for years, began with: “Sign-In Access Error.” Not exactly a useful, compelling or brand-building search result for the user to see. Check to see if you have any error pages by querying Google, Yahoo and Bing for site:www.yourcompanyurl.com. Eliminate error pages from the search engine’s index by serving up the proper status code in the HTTP header (see below) and/or by including a meta robots noindex tag in the HTML.
12. Does your “file not found” error page return a 200 status code? This is a corollary to the tip immediately above. Before the content of a page is served up by your Web server, a HTTP header is sent, which includes a status code. A status code of 200 is what’s usually sent, meaning that the page is “OK.” A status code of 404 means that the requested URL was not found. Obviously, a file not found error page should return a 404 status code, not a 200. You can verify whether this is the case using a server header checker and then into the form input a bogus URL at your domain, such as http://www.yourcompanyurl.com/blahblah. An additional, and even more serious, consequence of a 200 being returned with URLs that are clearly bogus/non-existent is that your site will look less trustworthy by Google (Google does check for this).Note that there are other error status codes that may be more appropriate to return than a 404 in certain circumstances, like a 403 if the page is restricted or 500 if the server is overloaded and temporarily unavailable; a 200 (or a 301 or 302 redirect that points to a 200) should never be returned, regardless of the error, to ensure the URL with the error does not end up in the search results.
13. Do you use “click here” or other superfluous copy for your hyperlink text? Wanting to rank tops for the words “click here,” eh? Try some more relevant keywords instead. Remember, Google associates the link text with the page you are linking to, so make that anchor text count.
14. Do you have superfluous text like “Welcome To” at the beginning of your title tags? No one wants to be top ranked for the word “welcome” (except maybe the Welcome Inn chain!) so remove those superfluous words from your title tags!
15. Do you unnecessarily employ redirects, or are they the wrong type? A redirect is where the URL changes automatically while the page is still loading in the user’s browser. Temporary (status code of 302) redirects — as opposed to permanent (301) ones — can cost you valuable PageRank. That’s because temporary redirects don’t pass PageRank to the destination URL. Links that go through a click-through tracker first tend to use temporary redirects. Don’t redirect visitors when they first enter your site at the home page; but if you must, at least employ a 301 redirect. Whether 301 or 302, if you can easily avoid using a redirect altogether, then do that. If you must have a redirect, avoid having a bunch of redirects in a row; if that’s not possible, then ensure that there are only 301s in that chain. Most importantly, avoid selectively redirecting human visitors (but not spiders) immediately as they enter your site from a search engine, as that can be deemed a “sneaky redirect” and can get you penalized or banned.
16. Do you have any hidden or small text meant only for the search engines? It may be tempting to obscure your keywords from visitors by using tiny text that is too small for humans to see, or as text that is the same color as the page background. However, the search engines are on to that trick.
17. Do you engage in “keyword stuffing”? Putting the same keyword everywhere, such as in every ALT attribute, is just asking for trouble. Don’t go overboard with repeating keywords or adding a meta keywords tag that’s hundreds of words long. (Why even have a meta keywords tag? They don’t help with SEO, they only help educate your competitors on which keywords you are targeting.) Google warns not to hide keywords in places that aren’t rendered, such as comment tags. A good rule of thumb to operate under: if you’d feel uncomfortable showing to a Google employee what you’re doing, you shouldn’t be doing it.
18. Do you have pages targeted to obviously irrelevant keywords? Just because “britney spears” is a popular search term doesn’t mean it’s right for you to be targeting it. Relevancy is the name of the game. Why would you want to be number one for “britney spears” anyway? The bounce rate for such traffic would be terrible.
19. Do you repeatedly submit your site to the engines? At best this is unnecessary. At worst this could flag your site as spam, since spammers have historically submitted their sites to the engines through the submission form (usually multiple times, using automated tools, and without consideration for whether the site is already indexed). You shouldn’t have to submit your site to the engines; their spiders should find you on their own — assuming you have some links pointing to your site. And if you don’t, you have bigger issues: like the fact your site is completely devoid of PageRank, trust and authority. If you’re going to submit your site to a search engine, search for your site first to make sure it’s not already in the search engine’s index and only submit it manually if it’s not in the index. Note this warning doesn’t apply to participating in the Sitemaps program; it’s absolutely fine to provide the engines with a comprehensive Sitemaps XML file on an ongoing basis (learn more about this program at Sitemaps.org).
20. Do you incorporate your competitors’ brand names in your meta tags? Unless you have their express permission, this is a good way to end up at the wrong end of a lawsuit.
21. Do you have duplicate pages with minimal or no changes? The search engines won’t appreciate you purposefully creating duplicate content to occupy more than your fair share of available positions in the search results. Note that a dynamic (database-driven) website inadvertently offering duplicate versions of pages to the spiders at multiple URLs is not a spam tactic, as it is a common occurrence for dynamic websites (even Google’s own Googlestore.com suffers from this), but it is something you would want to minimize due to the PageRank dilution effects.
22. Does your content read like “spamglish”? Crafting pages filled with nonsensical, keyword-rich gibberish is a great way to get penalized or banned by search engines.
23. Do you have “doorway pages” on your site? Doorway pages are pages designed solely for search engines that aren’t useful or interesting to human visitors. Doorway pages typically aren’t linked to much from other sites or much from your own site. The search engines strongly discourage the use of this tactic, quite understandably.
24. Do you have machine-generated pages on your site? Such pages are usually devoid of meaningful content. There are tools that churn out keyword-rich doorway pages for you, automatically. Yuck! Don’t do it; the search engines can spot such doorway pages.
25. Are you “pagejacking”?” Pagejacking” refers to hijacking or stealing high-ranking pages from other sites and placing them on your site with few or no changes. Often, this tactic is combined with cloaking so as to hide the victimized site’s content from search engine users. The tactic has evolved over the years; for example “auto-blogs” are completely pagejacked content (lifted from RSS feeds). Pagejacking is a big no-no! Not only is it very unethical, it’s illegal; and the consequences can be severe.
26. Are you “cloaking”? “Cloaking” is the tactic of detecting search engine spiders when they visit and varying the content specifically for the spiders in order to improve rankings. If you are in any way selectively modifying the page content, this is nothing less than a bait-and-switch. Search engines have undercover spiders that masquerade as regular visitors to detect such unscrupulous behavior. (Note that cleaning up search engine unfriendly URLs selectively for spiders, like Yahoo.com does on their home page by dropping their ylt tracking parameter from all their links, is a legitimate tactic.)
27. Are you submitting to FFA (“Free For All”) links pages and link farms? Search engines don’t think highly of link farms and such, and may penalize you or ban you for participating on them. How can you tell link farms and directories apart from each other? Link farms are poorly organized, have many more links per page, and have minimal editorial control.
28. Are you buying expired domains with high PageRank scores to use as link targets? Google underwent a major algorithm change a while back to thwart this tactic. Now, when domains expire, their PageRank scores are reset to 0, regardless of how many links point to the site.
29. Are you presenting a country selector as your home page to Googlebot? Global corporations sometimes present first-time visitors with a list of countries and/or languages to choose from upon entry to their site. An example of this is at EMC.com. This becomes a “worst practice” when this country list is represented to the search engines as the home page. Happily, EMC had done their homework on SEO and is detecting the spiders and waving them on. In other words, Googlebot doesn’t have to select a country before entry. You can confirm this to be the case yourself: do a Google search a “cache:www.emc.com” and you will see the EMC’s U.S. home page.

Closing thoughts

If you’ve read this and thought, “Hmm, that was interesting” but you didn’t actually tick any marks on the above checklists, then you have extracted only a fraction of this article’s value. The simple action of printing out the checklists and checking the appropriate boxes one by one is the first step to doing things differently. Remember: if you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always gotten.

If you adhere to the advice laid out for you above, and stay tuned for Part 2 of this article which will include  a checklist covering best practices in SEO, you’ll be well on your way to a search engine optimal website. Go astray, and your rankings and perhaps even your reputation with the search engines could suffer.

Checklists are just the beginning on the path to SEO success. It’s important to engage with an SEO expert to help guide your organization through the changes necessary to optimize your site.

NOTE: Be sure to read the second part: SEO Checklist Part 2: Best Practices.

Now it’s time for some new (old) myths to add to my original collection, with thanks to Lee Odden, Duane Forrester, Ian McAnerin, Tony Adam, Hamlet Batista, Michael Geneles, Jeff Quipp, Mike Moran, Adam Audette and Christine Churchill for their contributions to the list below…

1. SEO should be owned and managed by IT. While SEO implementation has its roots in the web development and IT departments of most companies, it’s a marketing discipline more than a web development discipline. Accountability for effective SEO might be multi-departmental in theory, but the reality is that most organizations budget, staff and manage SEO programs as part of customer acquisition, i.e. marketing and sales. Do not let IT lead your SEO programs. IT is the wingman for Marketing when it comes to SEO.
2. SEO is a subset of Social Media. There are plenty of intersections between SEO and social media, but SEO is no more a subset of social media marketing than it is of public relations, customer service or media relations. Working together, effective SEO can boost social network growth and social media can facilitate link building. In this way, they are yin and yang but not super- or sub-ordinate to each other.
3. Using Flash will tank your SEO. The cost of a myth like Flash being bad for SEO can be substantial, such as having a boring website that doesn’t engage visitors or attract any links. Flash isn’t bad for SEO, it’s the absence of text and crawlable links in sites that are constructed with a single Flash movie that creates problems. Some Flash content can be crawled, but it’s embedding Flash within an HTML framework that allows websites to have the best of both worlds: rich media that engages site visitors and the presence of text and links to provide search engines and visitors information they can use to understand the site content.
4. SEO is a standalone activity. Many facets of web design, hosting, and so on can impact your organic results to more or lesser degrees. People tend to think that SEO sits in a silo and other things can go on around it without influencing the work required to increase rankings.
5. First you get your site launched, then you add all the SEO goodness. SEO is not some bolt-on, like an outdoor deck you tack on to the back of your home. It’s more like the electrical wiring throughout your new home. Sure, you can build the house without the electrical and add it in later, but you’ll have to tear out the drywall to do it. Which might be fine if you like tripling costs and needlessly extending out the timeframe. SEO starts well before the site launches: it’s reflected in the functional specs, wireframes, mockups, content plan, and so on. And it continues for the life of the website.
6. I just hired a killer SEO agency; they’ll hit a home run for me. The agency will perform to the incentives you provide it. If they aren’t sharing in the upside but instead simply doing dollars-for-hours consulting, then it’s in their own best interest to expend as few hours as possible and thus maximize the profit per hour worked. So if it’s not in the contract, then don’t expect them to do it. One can’t blame them, though, as they are consultants, not free advice givers. Still, don’t assume because you read three quotes and selected one that that agency will work with your best interests in mind. Some will, many will claim to. Their job is not actually to perform SEO, that’s just what they try to do. Their job is to increase recurring billing to build their business. Just like your job is to get more traffic to build your business.
7. SEO is separate from SEM, social, etc. Actually, SEO is but one part of a larger overall marketing plan. It’s NOT the center, nor should it be. It remains a single tactic. To treat it separately and invest only in it is to run the race with blinders on.
8. SEO is free. I wrote about this one a couple years ago on Search Engine Land. No SEO works for free, whether on your payroll or hired as a consultant, there is a cost. Ditto designers working on CSS changes, IT folks setting up domains and IP addresses, etc. There is a cost to turning the dials and moving the levers of SEO and to think it’s free is folly. Yes, it can be cheaper than paid search, but paid search can also convert faster and more frequently than SEO on many phrases, so there you go. Want really stellar conversion rates? Get a good email program running in house.
9. I can hire someone with a year’s SEO experience and they can manage the work as part of their job. You get back what you put in, at a minimum. Put in less, get back less. The time it takes a neophyte to learn the details that make SEO work will be lost to your company. Add in mistakes and missed opportunities and you could be sinking the ship with your own cannons! Plus, if you don’t know SEO, how can you hire someone who does?
10. Can you give me the top 5 things to do to rank better and drive traffic? For maximum effect, be sure to ask the question before they have had a chance to examine your site. This question is as frustrating for SEOs as “How much does it cost to SEO the typical website?”. I’d equate it to the unanswerable question: “How long is a piece of string?” Also, if you’re going to ask for the magic elixir for better rankings and traffic (and don’t forget “long life”), you might as well base success on the better objective of driving quality traffic — which is only understood through web analytics integration and tying in with post-click behavior metrics.
11. Because someone is senior in the company, they must understand everything and are making decisions with a broad knowledge base inclusive of SEO. Case in point: the “CEO list” of keywords, a.k.a. the “trophy terms,” which may not be receiving any search volume other than from the CEO him/herself. Chances are there are better words to focus on that can drive a higher business return. Tread carefully here; you don’t want to upset the CEO.
12. Spending lots of money in paid search helps your organic rankings. Maybe this one is too old and hoary to include here, but people still ask it. I still hear that all the time. Sometimes I wish it was that easy….but no. The two are unconnected.
13. It’s either SEO or PPC. Nope, both have their place, and both have strengths and weaknesses.
14. We have been around for a long time/are really famous, so we don’t have to do SEO. Uhhhh….no. I could write a book on the reasons why, but just…no.
15. I learned a nifty new SEO trick/tactic from SMX/SEL/etc. and now I have the key to victory! Most of the advanced tools and tactics you learn at conferences and sites like this one only work after you have optimized the basic SEO building blocks of your site. Most advanced tactics build on the basics, not replace them. In fact, most advanced tactics won’t even work unless you have the basics in place already. The wider the pyramid base of your SEO, the higher your rankings can go.
16. I’ve got lots of links, so I don’t need to build more. This is related to #24 from my previous article. Most engines look at several factors related to links, including age. Old (established) links tend to indicate authority, whereas new ones tend to indicate freshness and relevance. You can get by with either, but it’s best to have both authority and relevance.
17. Kicking off an SEO program is a slow, many months long process. This is a self-serving myth that can buy the SEO firm or consultant a lot of time to keep you paying while they aren’t performing. “Be patient, just give it more time” can be a great stall tactic. This can be the case, but it doesn’t have to be. At Covario, we have been able to counter this tendency using automation and software solutions. For example, we consistently launch SEO programs on Organic Search Optimizer in 30 days or less.
18. SEO is a major, time-intensive, costly IT initiative. Again, this can be the case, but not necessarily. Typically, IT barriers slow the programs down, but they don’t have to. There are simple, cost-efficient technological workarounds: server modules, proxies, SaaS solutions, etc.
19. Google penalizes for duplicate content. I’ve long stated that it’s a filter, not a penalty. It may feel like a penalty because of the resultant rankings drop, but Google’s intention is not to penalize for inadvertent duplication due to tracking parameters, session IDs, and other canonicalization snafus.
20. Tweaking your meta description is the way to optimize the Google snippet’s conversion potential. As I described in my article “Anatomy of a Google Snippet,” the snippet content can be cobbled together from data from multiple sources, including the meta description, the HTML source of the page (even from pulldown select lists), or from the Open Directory listing.
21. Getting a link from a high PageRank domain will increase my PageRank and rankings. While this isn’t entirely untrue, as it will earn a level of “authority”…While the overall PageRank of a domain matters, the authority of the page you are getting a link from is more important, along with a whole range of other factors.
22. Number of top 30 rankings for your site is a good metric for success. I’ve seen so many places that use rankings as the end-all-be-all SEO metric. While that bothers me, sometimes I get that you don’t have much more to go off of. That said, I wouldn’t attribute value to rankings beyond the top 10. Once you start talking about rankings at the bottom of page 2 or worse, it’s largely irrelevant. How often have you seen traffic of any significance to a page based on it ranking #26? Does that mean it’s folly to track rankings beyond the top 10? Not at all. It’s useful for tracking progress on efforts expended on (what started out as) a poor campaign.
23. Google is looking at all the data they collect from toolbar, Chrome, etc. and using these signals for rankings. I’ve never seen a single instance where this has proved to be true…I’ve noticed many sites that are #1 in their category in regards to traffic and time spent online, yet they do not rank top 5 or even top 10 for some terms, even with good external links.
24. SEO is a chess game. The spammers make a move, the search engines respond, and around it goes. Spam tactics may come and go, but best practices stay pretty constant. That said, SEO is kind of like a chess game where you can move both your own and your opponent’s pieces (muahaha!).
25. Using a minimum of 40 tags per blogpost helps to increase your ranking in search engines. This was from a self-proclaimed marketing guru and SEO expert, if you can believe it.
26. Registering every room + phone extension in our office building as a separate location with Google Places helped us rank for generic_search_term_here Can you believe an in-house SEO presented this at a recent conference? (*cringe*)
27. The canonical tag is just as effective as 301 redirects for fixing canonicalization Not. really.
28. Toolbar PageRank is an accurate window into the internal/real PageRank. It’s only an approximation into internal/real PageRank that is a valuable metric to prioritize the crawling and indexing of pages. Pages with higher internal PageRank are crawled more frequently and indexed faster. This isn’t necessarily true for toolbar PageRank. According to Hamlet Batista, the real PageRank should be a number between 1 and 0. Many pages with no toolbar PageRank actually do have real PageRank. Google simply takes a while to update the values or might decide to not show the real value. On the other hand, pages with very low internal PageRank (few or no quality inbound links) usually don’t even get crawled.
29. Google uses the bounce rate as a ranking signal. The bounce rate metric primarily reflects how well-targeted a traffic source or keyword is or isn’t for the destination page. It doesn’t say much about the overall quality of the site, and is too noisy to be used as a ranking signal unless is part of the personalization feature.
30. Flawless HTML validation can help improve your rankings. Take any popular search term and run a validation check against the top 10 results. Most of them will fail validation. Search engines are much more interested in the quality of the content on the page and are smart enough to overcome most parsing errors in HTML documents.
31. Validating and cleaning up the HTML will drastically increase the speed of a site or page. The biggest bottleneck to overcome in site speed is not what you think! If you want to be blown away, read Google chief performance engineer Steve Souders’ books High Performance Web Sites (for primarily server-side stuff like caching reverse proxies and Gzip compression) and Even Faster Websites (for primarily client-side stuff like JavaScript optimization.)
32. Google cannot detect artificial link schemes such as three-way links, viralinks, link wheels, blog link networks, etc. Natural link structures follow specific statistical distributions and so do artificial ones. Google and other search engines employ a small army of advanced mathematics PhDs (can you say “graph theory”?), and they can – and do – identify artificial link schemes and usually penalize everyone involved.
33. That any agency can truly offer SEO without including some form of link building effort. There are many agencies (perhaps the majority) claiming to offer superior SEO, and do not engage in link building. With links thought to account for more than 50% of the algorithm, link building is crucial!
34. SEO is about rankings, not conversion. Conversion is a critical component to SEO. I’m a big proponent of optimizing the elements that will improve clickthrough from the SERPs — shortening the URL length, getting bolded words (KWiC) into your listing, refining the title and snippet copy to include compelling calls-to-action and value propositions — particularly at the beginning of the title & snippet which are the most viewed pieces of the listing. There’s real money to be had in that end of SEO.
35. Google gives extra weight to links from a few certain, more trustworthy top-level domains (TLDs) — specifically .edu, .gov, and .mil. Matt Cutts went on record on the topic of .edu links in an interview with me:

    “There is nothing in the algorithm itself, though, that says: oh, .edu–give that link more weight. It is just .edu links tend to have higher PageRank, because more people link to .edu’s or .gov’s.”

    In my view, it’s because .edus tend to be in pristine link neighborhoods that these links are so valuable.

36. You can keep all your PageRank/link juice by not linking out. This may be conventional wisdom, but the math doesn’t work this way, as Hamlet Batista explains here. While keeping most/all links internally can help increase the overall PageRank of a site, the way the original PageRank formula works forces every site to give out link juice whether it does so explicitly or not.

Read part one of this series, 36 SEO Myths That Won’t Die But Need To.

In this follow-up, I’d like to revisit some of the most fervently defended myths, clarify any potentially vague statements, and provide the occasional caveat.

Myths are born when folks mistake correlation with causation. And when they make inferences and draw conclusions without rock-solid data or methodology. Next thing you know a “feeling I’ve got about this” is espoused as fact.

It’s the nature of myths that they aren’t easily dis-proven or dismissed. So the myths persist.

And as Rand Fishkin so astutely recognized, there is strong incentive for someone to defend a myth if they had advanced that myth previously to a public audience, boss, client, etc. It’s self-preservation instinct, to “save face.” Consequently, some folks hold on to certain myths for dear life. Their very careers hang in the balance — or so they think.

But I’m not infallible either, so I wanted to get confirmation from at least a dozen other industry veterans that I’m not off-the-mark. For the most part I received vigorous agreement. Adam Audette summed it up nicely:

I can’t believe the hornet’s nest you stirred up with that post! I was THIS close to commenting on that post, but didn’t. I was going to say that I agree completely w/ your list and that everyone disagreeing needed to SIT DOWN :) Decided I’d take the easy route and stay out of it….

A hornet’s nest indeed! Well put.

Rand did a great job debunking the myths where I faced the strongest resistance. I won’t recap and rehash all that here, but I encourage you to read his post.

In the comments of my previous article, I received criticism that I was merely providing assertions rather than citing research and disclosing hard factual data. If I fully backed up every point with enough research to satisfy everyone, the article would have turned into a 10,000 word tome. Fitting for a white paper or ebook, not so much for an article/post to Search Engine Land. As it is, this follow-up article, at over 5,000 words (divided into two parts), has exceeded my last one.

My choice of studies to cite was also brought into question. It’s always possible to find flaws and things to pick at in someone else’s study, but in my opinion, having some research is a lot better than having none. Otherwise you’re flying blind, drawing only from your own observations, conclusions and hunches. In general I think we’re all relying on flawed data. Would anyone’s SEO experiment truly stand up to scientific scrutiny?

There are so many moving parts — so many influencing factors — that we can’t control or isolate out of the system when conducting experiments. Search is in a constant state of flux — the algorithms, indices, competitors, data propagation across data centers, etc. Given this, how can one possibly create a proper control group for scientifically rigorous experiments? But we do our best. That’s SEO. It’s the nature of the beast.

Now let’s address some of the SEO myths on which I was challenged…

Myth #2: Don’t use Google Analytics because Google will spy on you and use the information against you.

I’m not one of those tinfoil hat conspiracy theorists, but who knows, maybe someday I’ll be sorry that I wasn’t. Michael Geneles says:

“I am definitely NOT the most paranoid SEO out there… However, I’ve been burned enough times to use any Google services (Google Analytics included) on some of my “more aggressive” experimental sites. Thank god for Piwik. Some of us don’t want Google to learn our IPs and have the ability to make the association between different web properties that we play with. That’s why I never “touch” my client’s Google accounts without a proxy.”

Myth #3: Your PageRank score, as reported by Google’s toolbar server, is highly correlated to your Google rankings.

For further evidence, there is some exact data refuting this myth; you can repeat this process yourself and you’ll get similar results.

Myth #4: Having an XML Sitemap will boost your Google rankings

Google goes on record to say on the Google Webmaster Central Blog that “A Sitemap does not affect the actual ranking of your pages.” It doesn’t get any more explicit than that. One caveat that Ian McAnerin notes (and this partially relates to myth #14 about fresh content): Until your site is fully or mostly indexed, you won’t usually rank as well as you should. Therefore at first you will often see an improvement to your rankings if you have an XML sitemap and/or frequently updated content (and enough links to justify the visits to that content), but this is just due to faster indexing. Once a certain “critical mass” of your site is indexed, there will usually be no further effect. Ian’s never seen a difference when he does this for established sites, only brand new ones.

It’s not about the updates (which encourage more visits, and thus more opportunities to index new pages) or the XML — it’s the indexing. You can get roughly the same effect (plus link weight and anchor text benefits) simply by doing a link building campaign instead (or in conjunction with).

Myth #5: Since the advent of personalization, there is no such thing as being ranked #1 anymore because everyone sees different results.

I contend that you are unlikely to see a drastic reshuffling of the Google results from personalization, particularly if this is not a query that you repeatedly make. A single website may shift drastically in a particular SERP when personalization is on. Nonetheless, a head-to-head comparison of a page of SERPs personalized and non-personalized will return mostly the same results with minor shifts here and there. A listing may disappear or be replaced, but we’re not talking about a completely different set of results being swapped in and out.

Even for such an ambiguous query as “dolphins” (do I mean the football team or the cute sea mammal?), the first page of results doesn’t change drastically even if I do a bunch of football related queries first, such as “football”, “patriots” and “nfl”. I still get mostly animal-related results, with a bit of movement in the lower half of the page. #6 shifted to position 7, #7 shifted to position 8, and #8 shifted to position 6. My point: if you’re ranked in the #1 position with personalized web search set to 0 (“&pws=0″ added to the end of the Google SERP URL), I think you’ll find, generally speaking, that you’ll be at #1 for the majority of searchers, whether personalization is enabled or not.

Mike Moran states:

“What I think is true is that, for many queries, a single search result is #1 the great majority of the time, but I think it is less true than it once was and that ranking reports are not nearly as valuable as they were a few years ago. It’s better to focus on traffic and conversions and not get too hung up on rankings.”

Myth #6: Meta tags will boost your rankings.

Note that I did not say that ALL meta tags are a waste of your time. Meta descriptions (not meta keywords) are still worthwhile, even though they won’t improve your rankings, as they can influence the snippet that’s displayed as part of your Google listing. More on how this works in my article “Anatomy of a Google Snippet“.

Myth #9: Having country-specific sites creates “duplicate content” issues in Google.

One caveat that Thad Kahlow notes: Google is much more likely to handle this well if the domain is set up on a ccTLD or if it’s been set up in Google Webmaster Tools under a common folder that allows for the webmaster to set the country specification.

Myth #14: It’s important for your rankings that you update your home page frequently (e.g. daily.)

I think freshness is mildly helpful but generally not required to maintain a high ranking (QDF “query deserves freshness” searches notwithstanding). Particularly if you have strong domain authority, you can maintain a top position in Google for a very long time without updating the page content. Take for example http://kidshealth.org/kid/ill_injure/sick/food_allergies.html which ranks on page 1 in Google for “food allergies” — yet this article hasn’t been updated in years.

That said, I wouldn’t dissuade you from keeping your content up-to-date. Indeed, regular updates are good for users and can make a site more link-worthy so that it attracts links at a faster rate than the competition. Just consider that there are a limited number of hours in the day, so your time may be better spent proactively going after quality backlinks than incessantly updating the page content.

Myth #15: Trading links (en masse) helps boost PageRank and rankings.

Building a massive reciprocal link network comprised of irrelevant sites is at best a waste of time and at worst an invitation for a penalty. Generally speaking, reciprocal links aren’t necessarily worthless, but they sit pretty low in the food chain. There are of course exceptions. Nevertheless, I’d always steer clear of link farms and link exchanges. I wouldn’t turn my nose up to a relevant reciprocal link from a trusted site, but my preference would be for a one-way link from that trusted site. Make sense?

Aaron Wall‘s position on reciprocal links is that as long as the trades are strategic, with quality sites, and don’t look like run of the mill trades, then they can help out a lot. He says this is especially true if they are part of a broader strategy (rather than being the entire strategy).

Myth #16: Linking out (such as to Google.com) helps rankings.

In my experience, the benefit of an external-pointing link is minor to nil. I am not alone in this view. Major caveat: I’m assuming there isn’t anything abnormal going on in your link neighborhood. If, on the other hand, you’re hoarding your link juice, or linking out solely to low quality sites, or your site’s nothing but broken links, then by all means correct that with some quality outlinks and I bet you’ll see an uplift. Michael Geneles has done some testing on this, and it is his opinion that outbound linking behavior does have some effect on rankings. He of course doesn’t recommend link hoarding, and he prefers to link out to sites with equal/higher mozRank.

Myth #20: H1 tags are a crucial element for SEO.

H1 tags used to be more important in years past, but as of late, they are only a minor signal. Prove it to yourself: try taking a site with headlines marked up with a font tag and turn that tag into an H1 in the template — without changing the copy within the headlines (or anything else for that matter) — and see what happens to your rankings. I think you’ll find the result to be not very impressive.

I’m not just basing this on anecdotal evidence, or on someone else’s study. Here at Covario, last year we did our own correlation study of page features that influence ranking. We did it to validate the scoring methodology for our Organic Search Insight product which our clients use to audit and track their sites’ SEO health. The 17-page report of findings is only for internal distribution — sorry, I can’t share it! The data collection and statistical analysis were rigorous though. We found H1 tags towards the bottom of the list of signals we examined, just above bold/emphasis tags.

If you’re getting benefit from H1 tags, consider that it may be because of the headline’s keyword prominence in the HTML rather than the fact your headline is inside an H1 container.

Myth #31: Home page PageRank on a domain means something (important).

I admit I’m being a little bit provocative here. This isn’t to say that toolbar PageRank is completely useless. At a minimum, PageRank scores have entertainment value. Seriously though, I just wouldn’t bet my business on that little green meter.

And since when is describing an entire site by a page-specific metric such as PageRank somehow accurate? As an indicator of domain-wide importance/trust/authority I’d take domain mozRank and mozTrust scores any day over a single page’s (truncated, possibly randomized) PageRank score.

A home page’s PageRank score can’t indiscriminately be extrapolated to internal pages. It’s not a given that a PageRank 4 will lead directly to a PageRank 3. The PageRank dropoff could be abrupt and marked if the site architecture is a mess. It’s a sad state of affairs when a high-PR home page stands alone among an army of low- or no-PR internal pages, but it happens.

Another key point about PageRank: the higher the integer score, the more seriously you can take the score (thanks to the logarithmic nature of PageRank). A toolbar PageRank of 8 is way more meaningful and less likely to be off by several integers from the true PageRank used for ranking purposes, versus a PageRank of 4.

Minimally, if the page registers some amount of toolbar PageRank, it is 100% guaranteed to be crawled, and most probably it will be indexed too — according to Hamlet Batista.

Myth #33: The clickthrough rate on the SERPs matters (for ranking.)

I encourage all the naysayers on this one to watch this Whiteboard Friday. Rand also discusses the potential for abuse/manipulation here as further evidence:

…should any SEO ever discover that it substantively impacts rankings, we’re going to be faced with an army of zombie botnets trying to take over our computers not to send email spam, but to click on links through our “reputable” Google accounts. Just look at the hacks of Facebook, Twitter & WordPress over the past few weeks and ask yourself – if any spammer could show any financial incentive or ability of clicks to influence Google, would we really have as (organic) click-fraud free a world as we do today?

Personally, to date I’ve seen nothing to indicate that CTR influences rankings. If anyone has evidence to the contrary, I’d love to hear about it. I’m not precluding that Google may some day use CTR as a signal.

Michael Geneles sees it differently. His view is that a good CTR combined with a low bounce rate “helps to show proof of relevance and user engagement.”

Myth #34: Keyword density is da bomb (i.e. measure keyword densities of competing listings and aim to match them.)

Honing in on a particular keyword density value while editing page copy is a colossal waste of time, a distraction from what really matters. Granted, keyword density measurements can help identify extreme situations — such as where there is no use of the keyword, or the term is being spammed into the page too often. But outside of those outlier scenarios, what is the point? There is an ideal score to aim for. There is no value in benchmarking against competitors’ keyword densities. If your SEO consultant tells you otherwise, turn and run!

Myth #35: Hyphenated domain names are best (preferable) for SEO.

Certainly a hyphenated domain can still perform well in the SERPs. The operative word here is preferable. Although a hyphenated domain can be an acceptable substitute when better choices aren’t available (such as a hyphenless .com, .org, or .net), I would never favor a hyphenated domain over its non-hyphenated counterpart if both were available. Years ago I bought information-architect.com, but I would have bought informationarchitect.com instead if I had the choice — for reasons of branding, usability, and SEO. The more hyphens, the spammier the domain looks, and the less desirable it is. To me, the domain san-diego-real-estate-for-fun-and-profit.com is not at all appealing.

Caveat: I wouldn’t be very keen on the unhyphenated domain therapistfinder.com for a directory of psychologists, for example; I’d rather have the hyphenated version — thank you very much.

Myth #36: Great content (automatically) equals great rankings

This is not a foregone conclusion. Great content doesn’t necessarily rank because it’s great content. The content may deserve to be ranked, but if no one knows about it, or if the site architecture is so atrocious that it repels the spiders, then it won’t rank. It’s as important to actively promote that great content as to have created it. I’m simply making an argument against that tired old phrase “Build it and they will come.” Don’t let these comments dissuade you from creating high quality content. Indeed, it’s a likely prerequisite for SEO success, especially when the keywords being targeted are highly competitive.

Read part two of this series, 36 More SEO Myths That Won’t Die But Need To.

You can even pre-empt myths before they take hold, as Matt Cutts attempted in his recent post, Google Incorporating Site Speed in Search Rankings. Despite Matt’s best efforts, I am sure this won’t be the last time we hear (or read) the myths “site speed is a major new factor in determining Google rankings” and “the site speed signal will help big sites who can pay more for hosting.”

Sometimes the myths get debunked, only to end up coming back with a vengeance. Take the meta keywords tag for instance. Google never did support this worthless tag. But apparently, Yahoo had been “supporting” the tag for some time. Remember when Yahoo went on the record (at the SMX East 2009 conference) to say they were no longer giving any credence to the meta keyword tag? Then, within days Danny Sullivan published his findings from some of his own tests. Turned out Yahoo’s assertion on the meta keywords tag was wrong. In Yahoo it apparently still is a signal (albeit an incredibly minor one.) Oops.

I, for one, hate misinformation and disinformation, and our industry, unfortunately, is rife with it. I’m going to do my part in fighting this menace and spreading the truth — by exposing some of the more insidious myths in this very article. I think this is only fitting, considering Covario’s oft-stated goal is to be “the source of truth” for our clients on the performance of their SEO and SEM.

And now, without any further ado, the list…

1. Our SEO firm is endorsed/approved by Google. The following comes from an actual email a friend of mine received from an SEO firm last year:

   We are…Google Approved, a partner with Google, they endorse us as an optimizer, and their list includes very few partners, and we are one of them!. To find us on their list please go to: http://www.google.com/websiteoptimizer/woac.html and select region: United States; scroll to the middle of the page and find National Positions.”

   Hmm…. you won’t find them listed there anymore.

2. Don’t use Google Analytics because Google will spy on you and use the information against you. This one comes straight from the conspiracy theorists. Google has made numerous assurances that they aren’t using your traffic or conversion data to profile you as a spammer.
3. Your PageRank score, as reported by Google’s toolbar server, is highly correlated to your Google rankings. If only this were true, our jobs as SEOs would be so much easier! It doesn’t take many searches with SEO for Firefox running to see that low-PageRank URLs outrank high-PR ones all the time. It would be naive to assume that the PageRank reported by the Toolbar Server is the same as what Google uses internally for their ranking algorithm.
4. Having an XML Sitemap will boost your Google rankings. I just heard this one from a fellow panelist in an SEO session at a conference I presented at within the last month (I won’t mention who, or which show.) This made me cringe, but I bit my lip rather than embarrass and contradict them in front of the audience. Should I have spoken up? Did I do the audience a disservice by leaving this myth unchallenged? I struggled with that. In any event, Google will use your sitemaps file for discovery and potentially as a canonicalization hint if you have duplicate content. It won’t give a URL any more “juice” just because you include it in your sitemaps.xml, even if you assign a high priority level to it.
5. Since the advent of personalization, there is no such thing as being ranked #1 anymore because everyone sees different results. Although it is true that Google personalizes search results based on the user’s search history (and now you don’t even have to be logged in to Google for this personalization to take place), the differences between personalized results and non-personalized results are relatively minor. Check for yourself. Get in the habit of re-running your queries — the second time adding &pws=0 to the end of Google SERP URL — and observing how much (or how little) everything shifts around.
6. Meta tags will boost your rankings. I’m so sick of hearing about meta tags. Optimizing your meta keywords is a complete waste of time. Period. They have been so abused by spammers that the engines haven’t put any stock in them for years and years. What about other meta tags — such as meta description, meta author, and meta robots — you ask? None of the various meta tags are given any real weight in the rankings algorithm.
7. It’s good practice to include a meta robots tag specifying index, follow. This is a corollary to the myth immediately preceding. It’s totally unnecessary. The engines all assume they are allowed to index and follow unless you specify otherwise.
8. It’s helpful if your targeted keywords are tucked away in HTML comment tags and title attributes (of IMG and A HREF tags.) Since when have comment tags or title attributes been given any weight?
9. Having country-specific sites creates “duplicate content” issues in Google. Google is smart enough to present your .com.au site to Google Australia users and your .co.nz site to Google New Zealand users. Not using a ccTLD? Then set the geographic target setting in Google Webmaster Tools; that’s what it’s there for. Where’s the problem here?
10. You can keep search engines from indexing pages linked-to with Javascript links. There are many documented cases of Google following JavaScript-based links. Google engineers have stated that they are crawling JavaScript links more-and-more. Of course, don’t rely on Google parsing your JavaScript links, but don’t assume it will choke on them either.
11. Googlebot doesn’t read CSS. You’d better believe Google scans CSS for spam tactics like hidden divs.
12. You should end your URLs in .html. Since when has that made a difference?
13. You can boost the Google rankings of your home page for a targeted term by including that term in the anchor text of internal links. Testing done by SEOmoz found that the anchor text of your “Home” links is largely ignored. Use the anchor text “Home” or “San Diego real estate” — it’s of no consequence either way.
14. It’s important for your rankings that you update your home page frequently (e.g. daily.) This is another fallacy spread by the same aforementioned fellow panelist. Plenty of stale home pages rank just fine, thank you very much.
15. Trading links helps boost PageRank and rankings. Particularly if done on a massive scale with totally irrelevant sites, right? Umm, no. Reciprocal links are of dubious value: they are easy for an algorithm to catch and to discount. Having your own version of the Yahoo directory on your site isn’t helping your users, nor is it helping your SEO.
16. Linking out (such as to Google.com) helps rankings. Not true. Unless perhaps you’re hoarding all your PageRank by not linking out at all — in which case, that just looks unnatural. It’s the other way around, i.e. getting links to your site — that’s what makes the difference.
17. It’s considered “cloaking” — and is thus taboo and risky — to clean up the URLs in your links selectively and only for spiders. If your intentions are honorable, then you have nothing to fear. All the major search engines have said as much. You are helping the engines by removing session IDs, tracking parameters and other superfluous parameters from the URLs across your site — whether it’s done by user-agent detection, cookie detection or otherwise. After all, if it were bad, would Yahoo be doing it? Check it for yourself: visit the Yahoo.com home page with the Googlebot user agent string (e.g. with Firefox using the User Agent Switcher extension). You’ll notice the “ylt” parameter has been stripped from all the links.
18. If you define a meta description, Google uses it in the snippet. We already learned from my last column (“Anatomy of a Google Snippet“) that this is oftentimes not the case.
19. The bolding of words in a Google listing signifies that they were considered in the rankings determination. Also discussed in my last column, this phenomenon — known as “KWiC” in Information Retrieval circles — is there purely for usability purposes.
20. H1 tags are a crucial element for SEO. Research by SEOmoz shows little correlation between the presence of H1 tags and rankings. Still, you should write good H1 headings, but do it primarily for usability and accessibility, not so much for SEO.
21. There are some unique ranking signals for Google Mobile Search, and they include the markup being “XHTML Mobile”. Google Mobile Search results mirror those of Google Web Search. By all means, create a mobile-friendly version of your site; but do it for your users, not for SEO.
22. SEO is a black art. And it’s done, usually in a dark room, by some rogue SEO consultant, without requiring the involvement of the client / rest of the company. If SEO were like that, our lives would read like spy novels.
23. The Disallow directive in robots.txt can get pages de-indexed from Google. As I explained in my article “A Deeper Look at Robots.txt“, disallows can lead to snippet-less, title-less Google listings. Not a good look. To keep pages out of the index, use the Noindex robots.txt directive or the meta robots noindex tag — NOT a Disallow directive.
24. SEO is a one-time activity you complete and are then done with. How many times have you heard someone say “We actually just finished SEOing our site”? It makes me want to scream “No!” with every fiber of my being. SEO is ongoing. Just like one’s website is never “finished,” neither is one’s SEO. Catalog marketers get this better than anyone else: they are used to optimizing every square inch of their printed catalog. There is always more performance to be wrung out. The “set it and forget it” misconception is particularly prevalent among IT workers — they tend to treat everything like a project so that they can get through assignments, close the “ticket” and move on, and thus maintain their sanity. I can’t say I blame them.
25. Automated SEO is black-hat or spammy. There is nothing wrong with or inappropriate in using automation. Indeed, it signals a level of maturity in the marketplace when industrial-strength tools and technologies for large-scale automation are available. Without automation, it would be difficult to impossible for the enterprise company to scale their SEO efforts across the mass of content they have published on the Web. Chris Smith paints a compelling picture for SEO automation in this classic post.
26. A site map isn’t for people. A good (HTML, not XML) site map is designed as much for human consumption as it is for spiders. Any time you create pages/copy/links solely for a search engine, hoping they won’t be seen by humans, you’re asking for trouble.
27. There’s no need to link to all your pages for the spiders to see them. Just list all URLs in the XML Sitemap. Orphan pages rarely rank for anything but the most esoteric of search terms. If your web page isn’t good enough for even you to want to link to it, what conclusion do you think the engines will come to about the quality and worthiness of this page to rank?
28. Google will not index pages that are only accessible by a site’s search form. This used to be the case, but Google has been able to fill out forms and crawl the results since at least 2008. Note this doesn’t give you permission to deliberately neglect your site’s accessibility to spiders, as you’d probably be disappointed with the results.
29. Placing links in teeny-tiny size font at the bottom of your homepage is an effective tactic to raise the rankings of deep pages in your site. Better yet, make the links the same color as the page background, and/or use CSS to push the links way out to the side so they won’t detract from the homepage’s visual appearance! (I am being facetious here, don’t actually do this.)
30. Using a service that promises to register your site with “hundreds of search engines” is good for your site’s rankings. If you believe that, then you may also be aware that there is a Nigerian prince who desperately needs your help to get a large sum of money smuggled out of his country, for which you will be richly rewarded.
31. Home page PageRank on a domain means something. As in: “I have a PageRank 6 site.” In actuality it means nothing. As I already stated, toolbar PageRank is misleading at best, completely bogus at worst. Furthermore, a high PageRank on one’s home page doesn’t necessarily equate to high PageRank on internal pages. That’s a function of the site’s internal linking structure.
32. Outsourcing link building to a far-away, hourly contractor with no knowledge of your business is a good link acquisition solution. And a sound business decision… NOT! As it is, the blogosphere is already clogged enough with useless, spammy comments in broken English from third-world link builders. No need to make it worse by hiring them to “promote” your site too.
33. The clickthrough rate on the SERPs matters. If this were true then those same third-world link builders would also be clicking away on search results all day long.
34. Keyword density is da bomb. Ok, no one says “da bomb” anymore, but you get the drift. Monitoring keyword density values is pure folly.
35. Hyphenated domain names are best for SEO. As in: san-diego-real-estate-for-fun-and-profit.com. Separate keywords with hyphens in the rest of the URL after the .com, but not in the domain itself.
36. Great Content = Great Rankings. Just like great policies equals successful politicians, right?

The following mythbusters contributed to the above list: Chris Smith, Rand Fishkin, and Eric Enge. (Thanks guys!)

Now it’s up to you, dear reader, to do your part in spreading the truth. Whenever possible, stand with your SEO brothers and sisters united against this damaging SEO mythology. Let’s all be SEO mythbusters.

Which SEO myths are you most sick of? What did I miss in my list? Talk back in the comments.

Postscript: Be sure to read the follow-up column to this, 36 More SEO Myths That Won’t Die But Need To.