seo myths busted
DESCRIPTION
Presentation given by Theo van der Zee at the Joomladay 2011 in the NetherlandsTRANSCRIPT
SEO Myths Busted
Theo van der Zee, CEO & Co-founder, FinishJoomla
Joomla!dagen Nederland, april 2011
PageRank
Myths
Linking
Up-to-date
KeywordsSuffix
Source: http://www.optify.net/seo/organic-click-through-rate/
“PageRank is a highly important metric”
Correlation PageRank to Position
0 0.5 1
No correlation
Perfectcorrelation
PageRank
0.18
Source: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-science-of-ranking-correlations
Google Toolbar PageRank Updates
Source: http://www.thenewsinn.com/next-google-page-rank-update-2011-history.html
• January 2011
• April 2010
• December 2009
• October 2009
• May 2009
• April 2009
• December 2008
• September 2008
• July 2008
• April 2008
• January 2008
• October 2007
An imprecise metric
4 5
PR 4 PR 4
“Our PageRank has dropped in the last PageRank update!
Now what?”
“I don’t know, sue Google in court?”
Better metrics than PageRank
• Number of customers
• Conversion rate
• Daily revenue per item
• Inlinking root domains
• Keywords sending visitors
PageRank is not important
“[…] many site owners seem to think
[PageRank] is the most important metric for
them to track, which is simply not true.”
-- Google Employee Susan Moskwa
Source: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=6a1d6250e26e9e48
“Linking out to other websites is bad”
What does Google say?
“In the same way that Google trusts sites
less when they link to spammy sites or bad
neighborhoods, parts of our system
encourage links to good sites”.
-- Head of Google’s Webspam team Matt Cutts
Source: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/pagerank-sculpting/
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:1_rio_de_janeiro_slum_2010.JPG
Source: http://seogadget.co.uk/google-page-penalty-for-comment-spam-rankings-and-traffic-drop/
Spammy comments
Rel=“nofollow”
<a rel=“nofollow” href=“http://www.joomla.org>No link value passed</a>
“Trading links helps boost PageRank and rankings.”
Source: http://www.blog.organicapex.com/reciprocal-link/
Reciprocal links
Anchor text
<a href=“http://www.joomla.org>This is the anchor text</a>
Source: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/10-illustrations-on-search-engines-valuation-of-links
Links in content > Links outside content
“Using a suffix such as .html for your
pages will make them rank better”
.html
http://www.example.org/index.html
.php
.exe
.cgi.asp
What the big boys are doing
http://www.zappos.com/teva-mush-ii-island-navy
http://digg.com/news/business/media/recent
http://www.amazon.com/Psychology-Peter-Gray/dp/1429219475/
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/security/
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/evangelizing-a-datadriven-culture
“A regularly updated webpage ranks higher in the search engines”
The long tail
Long tail
Short tail
What about you?
“Meta keywords tag boosts your rankings”
There he is again...
“[...] Google does not use the keywords
meta tag in our web search”
-- Head of Google’s Webspam team Matt Cutts
Source: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/keywords-meta-tag-in-web-search/
“I hope this clarifies that the keywords
meta tag is not something that you need
to worry about, or at least not in Google.”
In the Joomla! Administrator
Meta description as shown in Google
Meta title
Meta description
Extract meta keywords from page source
Q & A?
What did we learn?
• Stop obsessing over PageRank
• Link out to quality websites, don't link to bad neighborhoods
• Use rel="nofollow" to stop the link juice
• Handle reciprocal links with care
• Don't use a suffix in your URL
• Add new quality content on a regular basis
• Stop entering meta keywords, start using them as a research tool
Coupon code
JD11NL– 15% discount on all our products
– Valid until 2 weeks from now
– 50 coupons available
Theo van der Zee
Twitter: @finishjoomla