Search Engine Optimization Myths

Great Google Tips!

There are several myths that keep popping up in online discussion forums, the Usenet Newsgroups, and other places where people repeat these old saws as if they were reciting passages from the Bible. Among the most common myths:

1. Meta tags are important for search engine ranking.
2. Search engines (don't like)/(can't read) frames.
3. Search engines (don't like)/(can't read) Flash/Shockwave files.
4. Search engines (don't like)/(can't read) Javascript.
5. Resubmitting (web sites)/(pages) will damage rankings.
6. Resubmitting (web sites)/(pages) will improve rankings.
7. Pay Per Click advertising is helpful/required to get good ranking.
8. Registering for multiple domains will effectively increase traffic.

Meta Tags and Search Engine Ranking

Once upon a time, <meta> tags were new ideas and only those very knowledgeable in HTML, the native language of most webpages, had an inkling of their existance or purpose. Until Google came along in the late 1990's, search engines commonly gave great weight to <meta> tags. However, as the Search Engine Optimization industry blossomed and started to stuff these tags with endless streams of keywords. Google realized this was a problem and chose to ignore them. Today, only Yahoo! still pays any attention to <meta> tags for ranking purposes and only to a minor degree at that. Google will sometimes display the content of your Description <meta> tag if it contains elements of your search and they may use it as an indicator of quality, but as I say, not explicitly for ranking purposes on a keyword basis. Use your <meta> tags to help attract users when your pages appear in the search results and to help directories to categorize your site, but don't try to deceive the search engines with them. It won't help.

Search Engines (Don't Like)/(Can't Read) Frames

Rot! Utter Rot! If it was ever true, that time has long since passed. I've been studying search engines for several years now and I have yet to see one that was incapable of indexing frames-based websites or that penalized a site for using them. See my page on Search Engines and Frames. As you can tell, this one makes me a little nuts because it persists by sheer momentum and in spite of patently obvious evidence as to its folly. Frames do cause problems for users, and search engines treat them a bit differently when it comes to displaying them in the search results, but using <frame>s or <iframe>s is not the kiss of death for a site.

Search engines (Don't Like)/(Can't Read) Flash/Shockwave files or JavaScript

There is some truth here. Most search engines do not read Flash or JavaScript. Once again, the exception is Google. Google reads and indexes the text content in Flash files. It will even follow links in Flash files. Google will also detect complete URLs in JavaScript that is embedded in web pages, but the overall impact of such links on ranking is unknown. Google reads and sometimes indexes JavaScript files (.js), but there is no evidence they do anything with them... yet. Flash files and external JavaScript files are problematic for search engines because they are treated as separate entities and are not indexed as a part of the parent HTML file. Further, since they lack the mark-up facilities of HTML files, they can't be parsed for their most important keywords. So these files rarely rank for any non-unique search term unless you specify filetype:.swf or filetype:.js in your search.

Resubmitting To Search Engines

There are days when I think I should be in the business of offering search engine submissions services. Its an amazing business to be in. It reminds me of how Tom and Ray Magliozzi from NPR's Car Talk once described Dealer Rustproofing. You can't see it. You can't smell it. You can't taste it. And except for the receipt you got from the dealer, you have no evidence that he actually did anything. Let me be clear:
(a) There is no magic, secret formula for getting your site into the search engine indexes except by using proper HTML coding and by making sure that at least one other well-ranked webpage links to your site.
(b) Resubmission has absolutely no effect on how your site ranks in the search engines. If your pages have good link popularity (ie. PageRank) and are updated with reasonable frequency, the search engines will revisit them to make sure they have the most up-to-date version of that page. You can use the search engines standard submission form to get your site revisited, and that can be helpful when certain situations arise that can only be corrected by having the page/site re-indexed, but it usually takes quite some time simply because of the volume of submissions that the search engines receive. It doesn't hurt to resubmit your site, my point is only that there are very limited circumstances in which it will do you any good, and it's certainly not something you need to do on an ongoing basis.

Pay Per Click Ads Affect Your Search Results

Here's a great myth because it works both ways. That is, I've seen people claim that the search engines manipulate the search results in order to get "relevant" sites to pay for advertising, and I've heard other people complain because their site didn't get good rankings despite the fact that they spent a lot of money on pay-per-click ads.

The truth is that the search engines' advertising programs have their own staff and their own issues that don't have any relation to the regular search results. Search results are a zero-sum game. No matter how you slice it, there are a finite number of top results for any search. If the search engines muddy up the natural search results with irrelevant pages, their traffic will go down - slowly, but surely as users stop trusting them to deliver quality results. And when they lose users, the search engines' pay-per-click advertising revenues go down.

Similarly, the search engines do not pay attention to who's advertising on their sites. So advertising your site is not a shortcut to getting your site in the search engines. The surest path to indexing remains getting links from quality sites, and the PPC ads on those pages don't count. And if there was any truth to the rumor that having search engine ads on your site increased your site's rankings, don't you think you'd be seeing a swath of AdSense ads on this page right now?

Multiple Domain Names Boost Traffic

Have you noticed that you don't hear lots of stories of people paying outrageous sums of money for domain names like "www.free-beer.com" anymore. There are several reasons for that, and one of them is that your domain name has very little effect on search engine ranking. Search engines do pay some attention to the Top Level Domain (TLD) like www.somesite.co.uk or www.somesite.co.jp to determine the relevance of your site to a local search - searches that are limited to pages based in a given country - but they do not look at the words embedded in domain names for ranking purposes. There is some evidence that there is a small benefit in using keywords in file names, but not in the domain name. And since having multiple domain names pointing to the same content can really damage your rankings, you want to be very careful in how you use them. You should only create multiple domains if you have a compelling marketing reason for doing so.

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I hope I've helped reduce the anxiety that you can face when you start to become aware of the power of search engines. Overall, their goal should be the same as yours - to deliver a quality product or service to users. Good luck!