Top 10 SEO Myths You Need to Stop Believing ( Debunked )

by | Last updated Feb 10, 2023

There are a lot of beneficial SEO ranking factors, but some of them might drive you wrong if you react to them. The problem is determining which one is a myth. It might be difficult to tell what ranking factor is accurate and based on facts and what is just repeated from misinterpreted SEOs publications or Google assertions.

Top 10 SEO Myths You Need to Stop Believing ( Debunked )

Our team gathered and debunked the most famous SEO myths to help you find the right business path and boost your organic traffic the right way.

1. The Google Sandbox

Some fake SEO experts believe that new domains will be effectively suppressed in organic listings for a more extended period before promoting more openly. Some SEO experts will claim that this is just not the situation. So, who is correct?

SEOs who’ve been around for a long time will provide you with empirical data that supports and refutes the concept of a Google sandbox. Google appears to have solely assisted in the form of Twitter posts which are frequently misconstrued by the webmaster’s community. Also, most SEO experts don’t trust official SEO practices & guidelines shared by Google, as explained in this poll by John Mueller, the webmaster trends analyst of Google.

SEO experts dont trust Google Webmaster Department

Well, it’s FAKE. De facto, it appears that there is a length of transition during which Google attempts to analyze and evaluate the web pages of a new site. The period of analyzing and indexing the new websites properly may be compared to a sandbox, but there is no truth behind it. If you start a new website on a virgin domain name with high-quality content & high posting overage, you can get SEO traffic from the first month.

2. Duplicate Content Penalty

The myth is that if your webpage material is replicated somewhere else on the internet, Google will punish you. Understanding the distinction between computational censorship and human intervention is crucial to comprehend what is happening here, and the website that copies content will be penalized with a few steps. As a content owner, you are safe if someone steals or copies your original content.

You can simply report the website that steals your content for the Google Webmaster team. After Google Analytics will send a notification to the website’s administrator. If the content is not deleted, a Google employee will deindex the pages or delete the website from the Google index.

3. Advertising Is A Ranking Factor

This is a prevalent misconception that is entirely untrue and simple to disprove. The notion is that Google will prefer organizations that splurge with it through PPC advertising in organic listings.

The algorithms used by Google to prioritize organic traffic differ significantly from Adwords’s used to calculate PPC and RPM for sponsored posts. Conducting an online PPC campaign through Google Adwords simultaneously as performing SEO may assist your site in various ways, but it will not directly impact your SEO rankings.

These are yet another two myths that fake SEO experts will feed you. First, you can help your website with PPC advertisements, but it will not impact your overall SEO rankings. Second, SEO traffic is free, which is not valid. You must always invest considerable funds in content, optimization, and growth strategies for results ( sometimes you will never get results even if you have invested heavily, which makes SEO a high risk like media buying or more). Learn from our guide how to calculate the estimated SEO budget for your small business website to protect yourself from fake experts & make unrealistic goals.

4. Domain Age Impacts Ranking

This assertion is squarely in the category of “complicated cause with coincidence.” Age must be a performance component because a webpage has been online for many years and is performing highly. This fallacy has been disproved several times by Google. Indeed, Google Analyst John Mueller responded to a post claiming that domain age was one of the “200 indications of performance” in December 2020 by replying, “No, domain age contributes nothing.”

Is domain age a ranking factor

The reality is that an established web page has had much more time to do things properly. For example, a site that has been up and running for ten years is likely to have many relevant connections to its most popular keywords. A company that has only been up for a few months will have difficulty competing. The oldest site appears to perform better, implying that time is the crucial determinant but is not a necessary metric to impact your SEO strategies.

5. Google Use Analytics Data As A Ranking Metric

The popular belief is that Google incorporates data from your analytics account into its search factors it’s a tale passed down through the generations. Google has once again rejected this theory by stating that the algorithm does not utilize any data from Google Analytics. Using analytics as a scoring element would be difficult to monitor if we think about it correctly.

Google will also need to comprehend the complexities of each analytics account’s configuration while some may exclude all known bots, while others may not. Some people employ bespoke proportions and stream groups, while others haven’t set something up. It would be tough to use this information reliably. Take a look at the many web pages that utilize alternative analytics tools. What would Google’s reaction be if they were in their shoes? As a result, Google does not use any analytics data.

Therefore, this is also fake. This SEO myth is yet another example of “cause, not connection.” A high bounce rate across the board may or may not indicate a quality issue. Short-duration on-page might suggest that your website isn’t exciting or that your material is easy to consume. These indicators can help you figure out why you aren’t ranking highly, but they aren’t the reason.

6. Domain Authority Will Boost SEO Ranking

Google provided a page’s PageRank rating on its interface, which ranged from 1 to 10. Around 2013, Google decided to discontinue the PageRank in widgets, and after Google announced in 2016 that it would no longer utilize the PageRank taskbar measure in the future. Many alternative third-party reputation ratings have been generated in place of PageRank. Some SEO tools use these ratings to assess the “worth” of a website, but the formula will never be an exact depiction of how a web search rates a website.

SEOs frequently discuss a forum’s ranking strength in combination with its backlinks, also called domain authority. You can see where the misunderstanding stems from and why. Officials from Google have refuted that they utilize domain authority as a ranking factor. Also, Google debunks another misconception by claiming that they do not have total domain authority.

7. Bounce Rate Is A Measure Of Quality Content

The proportion of website visitors who do not engage after reaching the page is the bounce rate. A website’s statistics system, such as Google Analytics, is often used to evaluate it. Some “SEO experts” claim that it should be considered a scoring criterion because organic traffic is a predictor of success. Regrettably, it isn’t a reliable indicator of performance.

There are various reasons why a person may visit a website and then depart before engaging with it anymore. They may well have read all of the material on that website and then left to answer a call or join a meeting. The bounce ratio generated a contact for the firm in this case. For high-quality content, you must pick the right blogging niche when you have skills and knowledge, so that user engagement with your content will be higher.

Since a customer abandoning a webpage after landing on it might indicate poor information, it isn’t always the case. As a result, it wouldn’t be dependable for an engine to utilize as a performance metric. A more accurate measurement of the destination page’s value would be a user hitting a results page and then revisiting the results. It’s possible that the website’s content wasn’t what the visitor was looking for, so they went back to the search outcomes to discover another website or research.

8. Backlinks Equal Higher Ranking

Backlinks are vital, and there isn’t much debate about that among the SEO community, but it is still debatable how crucial it is in the long term. Backlinks are several factors that impact scores, although they may not be the most essential. Someone else will tell you it’s the one thing that can genuinely influence the situation.

We understand that linkages’ efficacy has altered through the ages and become more challenging to build an effective backlinks strategy. Link-building in the past was worth and simple as putting a website link anywhere you could throughout the untamed pre-Jagger era, unimportant websites, forum posts, and crafted stories were all valuable sources of backlinks.

Building backlinks is not as simple as it used to be in the golden days. Google’s engines have started to develop to encourage more vital, more relevant links while disregarding or penalizing “click bait” connections. Even building a PBN backlinks network is not worthwhile these days and is a waste of money, but fake digital marketing gurus are still scamming SEO beginners by selling them packages of PBN links.

There will be certain areas where SEO is so underdeveloped that a site may rank high without engaging in backlinks, based only on the quality of its material and technological performance. In most sectors, however, this is not the actual situation. Appropriate backlinking will assist with implementation, but it must be used with other adjustments like posting meaningful content and being search engine friendly.

9. Website Migration Equal Traffic Loss

It’s a phrase that SEO experts say far too often. All you have to do when transferring a site is recall rerouting any updating addresses. If only this were the case. In reality, web migration is among the most time-consuming and challenging SEO tasks.

A website migration is defined as a change in a web page’s design, system, URL, and contents. Loss of traffic after migrating a website is also a myth, so you must consider some changes to maintain your website’s ranks and online visibility:

  • Ascertaining that monitoring has not been interrupted
  • Update DNS
  • Redirect all URLs
  • Keeping the same content strategy
  • Assuring search engines bots can still reach the website
SEO Myths

10. Content Is The King

It’s a common occurrence in SEO groups and social conversations. “My competition is rating higher than my website, yet I have fantastic material, and theirs is dreadful,” is a typical gripe. After all, shouldn’t their website be rewarded for its “excellent” material by the online services?

Material quality is a relative factor because it’s even more challenging to be impartial when creating your material. Maybe your material isn’t superior to your rivals’ for the search words you want to score for from Google’s perspective. Perhaps you don’t satisfy the aim of searchers as well as they are doing. Maybe you’ve optimized your material too much, lowering its value. In some instances, more excellent content equates to higher ranks. In some cases, the site’s technical aspects or capacity of specialized significance may result in a lower ranking. One of the ranking algorithms’ factors is content, but it is not everything.

What Is the Bottom Line Here?

The problem is that we don’t understand how search engine crawlers function. As a result, most of what we’re doing as SEOs is experimentation, as well as informed speculation. It might be tough to put all of the promises you hear regarding SEO to the question when you’re just starting.

We have listed the top ten SEO myths by fake experts who have no value in real life and pose no threat to your website rankings. You can also debunk most myths with logical thinking, Google press releases, and online searches.

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