About the SEO beliefs

I ran through some forums and comments related to SEO, and i see that the majority of webmasters believe in urban legends regarding SEO. I also noticed 80% of information related to SEO is wrong. They are all scared about negative SEO, comment posting, duplicate content, trading links, reciprocal links, off topic links. To me, it is crazy to see the propaganda in SEO websites like SEOmoz. On the other hand, it is good for us, because thanks to the stupidity of some people we can get pagerank without suffering from competition.

Just to debunk some rumors.

1. reciprocal links:
at the bottom of cnn.com there is a link to cnnchile.com. It means that every cnn.com page has a link in the footer with cnnchile.com. I guess there Houndreds of thousands links since there are many articles created everyday. This a reciprocal link and also a sitewide link on both cnn.com and cnnchile.com. Cnn.com is a PR8 and cnnchile.com is a PR7

2. There are pages on the net where links are hidden in a span tag:
That's links that don't appear on the page but they appear in the source code and they are followed by googlebot. Websites get a lots of google juice thanks to those hidden links.

3. External links:
the google blog (googleblogATblogspotDOTcom) has 60 external links on its main page and it possesses a PR8

4. Comment posting:
googlebot reads comments, googlebot follows comment links.
On the Google Inc Webspam chief team Matt Cutts blog, there are comments, and there are also links (with nofollow but links)

5. off topic links:
If there would be an off topic links penalty, news website would be heavily penalized because they may have very different links on the same pages due to the diversity of article topics. One can be about child birth, another can be about unemployment. The two links may be in the same article...

6. Penguin or Panda:
To me, there is no penguin or panda issues. The issue is related to the competition. If you have PR1 or PR0 pages, you are in competition with many pages but if you have a page with a pagerank 8, you really don't care about penguin or Panda.


To be successful, there is a big need of links, wherever they come from, whatever they are.

Nice post this is really a different way to discuss the SEO beliefs. I am very impressed with this technique.

henriduf said:

if you have a page with a pagerank 8, you really don't care about penguin or Panda.

Click to expand...

I wish i had a pr8

good post btw...

Brainpulse said:

Nice post this is really a different way to discuss the SEO beliefs. I am very impressed with this technique.

Click to expand...

brainpulse.. that scam company ?

henriduf said:

6. Penguin or Panda:
To me, there is no penguin or panda issues. The issue is related to the competition. If you have PR1 or PR0 pages, you are in competition with many pages but if you have a page with a pagerank 8, you really don't care about penguin or Panda.


To be successful, there is a big need of links, wherever they come from, whatever they are.

Click to expand...

This is the real trick in SEO - how to become big enough that you will be "immune". In the meantime, you need to keep an eye on your backlink portfolio (at least that is what we think we should do).

+rep and thanks given for a great post.

I would nit pick details - but overall this is the way it is today - now.
Links still work
Feck "Neg SEO" - get on and do your own work
Co-citation (outbound links to authority sites) are actually adding value these days. Get some GOOD (GOOOOOD) OBL's
Some duplicate content - if on topic and handled correctly is abso-fricking-lutely fine
There is NOTHING wrong with links from ANY platform. Blogs WIKI etc. What can go a little wrong is too many links from the SAME platform. All this crap about "blog comments don't work"..ermm they do, they work just fine, just don't expect long lasting value from 25,000 PR0 comments on AA sites with no authority.
A crap link is a crap link, a good one is a good one. What platform it is on is 100% irrelevant. What SITE it is on - and whether that site has authority, context and PR - THAT'S relevant.
No problem with some off topic links. It's natural

Great post OP

Scritty

I wont deny there is a lot of propaganda but your examples are not relevant. CNN is a huge brand. There are many factors and what works well with one website can sink another.

You cant compare a big authority site like CNN with a random blog from dud named paco regarding sellings taco. But overall i think ppl are underrating some kind of links.

agree with some disagree with others

1. sitewide footer links... wtf... if CNN is kinda dumb doesnt mean we have to be too. they're extremely inefficient. in some cases they help with group penalties.

2. more dumb. then again cloacking works for a while and in certain cases and implementations.

4. d0f0llow = gold. n0f0llow = bad. that simple. cant be bother to explain.

danailo said:

I wont deny there is a lot of propaganda but your examples are not relevant. CNN is a huge brand. There are many factors and what works well with one website can sink another.

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Have you ever heard that google treat big companies differently? I don't think so.

Another example for you guys:

At the bottom of many tumblr, wordpress themes, you have often a link to the designer website who made the theme. It means that each time, a blog is created with this particular theme, the theme author website get a free inbound link.

Most of the people don't remove this link in the footer. So it means, the theme author get many backlinks from unrelated websites.

And now go to your footer, and if you have a link to the theme author website, check his pagerank, you are going to be surprised.

Let's take an example:
veganfoodyDOTtumblrDOTcom

Take a look at the footer you will see a link to theme author who is Carlo Franco. His website is a pagerank 7. I guess many people use his theme with his link at the footer.

Someone told me to find another example than cnn with less authority.


I know an adult website called pornotubeDOTxxx They have a header bar with a link to other network websites (milftubedotxxx,lesbiantubedotxxx). Each of the website have this header bar, so that they are all linked together. That's a sidewide link because the header bar appears on each page.