I once had a client, bless his little heart who was absolutely obsessed with quoting things he heard about SEO from various sources and would spout them as if they were the word of God.
“Well I heard”, “So and so said”, “Didn’t you know”. These were things I heard all the time and would cringe when he would start a sentence off like that.
The bitch in me wanted to say, well if know everything, why in the world did you need to hire me?
Of course I would never say that and instead I work tirelessly with him to teach him the difference between people who talk out their ass as if they know things and about blowhards who sometimes just flat out make shit up, I can only assume for the pure pleasure of seeing how many people they can convince their lies are real.
It took several months but by the time I finished the project we were able to get his traffic up more than 250% and improve his sales ratios drastically. And I did using real SEO techniques, not something that someone’s cousin’s brother told them. But the most important thing I taught this client was to stop listening to random people about SEO tips, especially if it’s from sites like GFY.
Which leads me to the point of this particular post … just because someone tells you something it doesn’t make it true.
I could tell you that the sky is purple and that the grass is orange but that doesn’t make it true. That’s obvious right? Yet so many people are willing to believe anything anyone tells them on the internet about SEO. Why?
I have a policy in regards to my SEO advice … if I haven’t seen it with my own eyes then it’s not true. I spend a lot of time and money researching search engine optimization and so that’s easy for me to say and obviously I can’t expect every person to do the same, but what I do want each and every one of you to remember is that just because some guy posts something on some random message board or blog, doesn’t mean it has one iota of truth to it.
Another thing to keep in mind is that just because something was true one day doesn’t mean it’s true today. So sometimes people will tell you something that really was true, but today it’s irrelevant or even worse, harmful.
Sometimes people pass on false information without even realizing they are doing it, so I’m not saying all people who tell you made up things about SEO are bad – sometimes they just don’t know better. They heard the false information elsewhere and it sounded legit to them so they passed it on.
I hear quite often that the more times someone LIKES a post you make or LIKES a Facebook LIKE button you put on you website, the better results it will get in search engines.
While it is true, social networking is a valuable part of your overall marketing plan and it does play into the big picture, especially when it comes to factors like social authority but in the end, it doesn’t matter if you get 500 likes or 5 million because Google doesn’t have access to that information so therefore they can’t use it to help or hinder your efforts.
Social networking is very important in terms of certain aspects of SEO but not everything you do on your social networking sites matter. And just so we are clear here, 417 people clicking LIKE on your website, doesn’t matter in regards to SEO. 417 people linking to your site does.
Google has said that right now they are treating Facebook and Twitter like any other website so if you create a post that has a link to your website and 417 people share it on their own timelines, that does help you because now 417 people have shared a link to your website. Now the catch to that is, it only helps you if the information posted is considered public and Google can access it. If people have their timelines set to private then it doesn’t really help you that much.
Did you know that your social networking sites have pagerank just like websites do? As I said before, that’s because Google has said they treat Facebook and Twitter like any other website. So if websites have a page rank, why wouldn’t your Facebook page as well?
My Facebook profile is a PR2 and my Twitter profile is a PR3. Vicky Vette’s twitter page is a PR5, while Sunny Leone’s is a PR4. I’m not sure why Sunny Leone’s is lower than Vicky Vette’s since she has so many more followers than Vicky Vette does but that’s how it worked out.
Public page rank is no longer available so I can’t re-run the numbers to see what they are now that Sunny Leone has passed more than a million followers on twitter. 🙁
The basic concept is the same for any other website as it is for your social networking profiles … the more people link to them, the higher page rank they will be and that means the more trust Google has in them.
Anyway the point I’m trying to make is that sometimes you just need to use your brain. If something doesn’t sound right to you, then it’s probably not true. If something does sound great, don’t just assume it is true … look into it. Talk to experts or people you know and trust and see what they think because you invest a lot of time into your website and I would hate to see you waste time working on something that didn’t do anything for you.