With search engine optimization being the backbone of successful websites today, it would seem that understanding the fundamental truths about certain aspects of SEO would be considered fairly important. However, it looks as if some old information has been painted in a new light recently, and really “debunks” common beliefs held even by some long-time search engine optimizers themselves; not to mention the thousands of practicing search engine optimization gossipers that religiously blog about theories and proposed search optimization strategies posted by other SEO gossips on their own hypothesis-strewn blogs.
Really, this insight into the misconceptions by even prominent search engine optimizers comes from two sources; first, there’s the interview of Matt Cutts, a senior software engineer that heads up Google’s Webspam team, discussing things such as link building, the robots.txt file and the noindex, nofollow meta tags. That interview was performed by Eric Enge and can be found on the StoneTemple website. The second part of this perception of misinformation decimating the search optimization field comes from WebProNews.com on their piece about “Debunking Wordpress SEO Expert Articles”; both the interview and the subsequent article are a must-read for any website owner performing their own search engine optimization or any amateur or established SEO who publishes information contrary to the “real scoop”.
What’s most interesting about these pieces is that they prove, without a doubt, that most self-proclaimed search optimization experts have it all wrong. For instance, disallowing search engine robots from accessing certain pages of your website doesn’t mean, in any way, that those pages won’t show up in the search engine indices, it only means that search engine robots will not access those pages when crawling your website. And, just because a page on your website has the “noindex” attribute added to the robots meta tag doesn’t meant that this page cannot accrue Page Rank and pass “link juice” out to other portions of your website or even external websites.
Because search engine optimization is such an integral part of a website’s success on the World Wide Web; website owners should take extraordinary care when following the plethora of advice freely given about search optimization. While in reality, the truths exposed by these two pieces may not harm your website as much as other misinformation that is rampant on the ‘net; it’s still misinformation. Think about it like this: would you really want to optimize your website based on mere conjecture of a SEO gossip spreading his or her half-truths based on nothing but rehashed fallacies? Probably not.
In any case, these two articles are a must-read for today’s website owners. Even if you have the luxury of hiring a professional optimization team for your website, you can still use these references to quiz your potential optimization candidates to see how much they really know.
