Google’s Matt Cutts On SEO Myths: Ads Correlate To Organic Results & More…

In a recent video from Google Head of Search Spam Matt Cutts, Matt talks about the biggest SEO myths he sees today.

By far, the biggest myth, according to Cutts, is how people think Google makes changes to their search results with the only intent of making more money. Matt said buying or not buying ads has no positive or negative impact on your rankings. In addition, Google does not make changes to their organic algorithms based on encouraging people to buy ads. All of this, according to Matt Cutts, is a big SEO myth.

The other large myth is more of an SEO pattern he sees often in the SEO forums and black hat SEO forums. It is “group think” where one SEO suggests doing a specific tactic will lead to good results in organic and then everyone follows.

The example Matt gives is that someone might say article directories leads to easy rankings and then six-months later the group will jump from article directories to guest blogging and from guest blogging to link wheels and so on.

Cutts explained that if someone found a loophole, they wouldn’t post it in a forum, sell it in an ebook or sell it via software – they would exploit it to make as much money off of it as possible. So that is another SEO myth he’d like to see SEOs stop following.

Here is the video:

About The Author

Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on SEM topics.