The year is almost over. Lots of things have happened in the SEO world. Changes, myths or misconceptions. Just do a quick search online and you will find endless SEO articles or blog posts with junk information, given by people who don’t really understand what it’s going on. In today’s article, I picked few common FAQs of SEO and link building, which I feel are crucial for success with your Search Engine Optimization.
Does the Duplicate Content Myth exist? Can I get it to rank?
Yes and no. In fact, it only exists if it’s coming from the same website. Otherwise you can rank even pages that are 100% duplicate content with the use of link building. You just need to get a sufficient amount of backlinks to your targeted page and it should rank high in Google, sometimes even outrank all the other pages if you build enough links.
What is Google Dance?
Basically it’s a random movement of a website and usually happens on the early stage of your linkbuilding campaign. However it can also occur if you build too many backlinks in a very short time period. It rarely happens but if it does, don’t freak out. Just keep doing what you are doing, which will show search engines a sense of stability and your site will be rewarded by higher rankings than even before.
What’s Google Sandbox?
If one day your site disappears, completely loses its rankings or you can’t even find it on search engines, that’s the sandbox. There are lots of reasons that your site can be sandboxed (de-indexed), but the basic thing is that search engines find your link popularity is extremely unnatural. The best way to prevent this is simple not to involve in any spammy linkbuidlings strategies and always build links slow organically.
Is Page Relevance really that relevant?
Lots of SEO experts will tell you how important getting links from websites relevant to yours, but that’s far from the truth (just do a quick backlink analysis on those web/graphic design companies to see where they got backlinks from). Although getting relevant links may help you get some targeted traffic, it will not carry more weight for SEO purposes. All that really matters is the anchor text of the links, which tells search engines who your are and gives you a vote for your desired keyword.
Will too many “bad” backlinks hurt my site?
Not at all! Don’t believe me? Try this yourself: pick one of your competitors and build tons of spammy comments from those blogs that have been spammed to death already within one day or two and wait for few weeks to see what happens. They might be gone from the top 100 results for a while but as long as they keep building links on a regular basis, in 99% of the cases, they will reappear and have higher rankings than ever before.
Do .EDU and .GOV links carry more value than normal links?
Again, no! .EDU or .GOV extensions do not carry any more weight in search engines’ eyes.The only reason that this misconception is so repeated is really because most .EDU and .GOV websites are truly authority sites that have tons of natural inbound links from other sites. So if your site is getting benefits from .EDU or .GOV sites, itis not because of their extensions. It’s actually because lost of them by default are very high quality websites.
Now you should have a more clear knowledge to start some serious linkbuildings for your 2011 SEO campaigns. For the rest of 2010, just enjoy the holidays with people you love. Here is a Merry Christmas from me. I hope Santa brought you everything you wished for and you would have #1 rankings for all of your desired keywords.