Today we’ll talk about Google and search engine optimization techniques. The reason why I chose this subject, is that I’m having some problems achieving good results in the russian blogging community and other minor projects. We’ll start with a brief overlook at the top 10 google myths.
The top 10 myths about google were talked about on the “Tricks and Treats” webmasters event a couple of weeks ago, so if anybody is interested, you could get detailed information on the Google Webmaster Central Blog. Anyways, I’ve formed a short-list out of the myths:
- Don’t worry about duplicate content, it will not penalize your site.
- Webmaster Tools validation doesn’t care if your page is HTML or XHTML and whatever doctype you picked.
- Getting listed in 1000s of search engines and directories does not make sense.
- Google AdWords, AdSense and Analytics are not evil.
- Keyword stuffing is bad, very bad.
- XML sitemaps are good, very good.
- PageRank is only 1 out of over 200 other factors that are used by Google for site rankings.
- Resubmitting your site to Google won’t harm it.
- Don’t stop working on your site, even if you rank 1st.
- Valid HTML/XHTML doesn’t affect the rankings.
I think that’s enough for a quick start. You see, the main problem in SEO is that people are making websites for search engines, rather than people, and that is why most of them don’t rank high in search results. Google is working on giving out good results, ones wanted by people, and that’s basically why sites “for search engines” don’t show up on results’ first page.
Although keyword stuffing, doorway pages and google bombing could still work in some manner. It’s not like in the late 90-s or mid 00-s, but keeping your anchors clean and nice, while posting inbound links to your site, is very important, just like when “google bombing” ;)
