A couple of days ago a website “State of Search” came out with a interview of 4 ex Google employees talking about some of the most recent Myths associated with search engine optimization (SEO) and pay per click strategies.

These 4 ex Google employees have a combined 20 years of Google Search Quality experience so they are more than qualified to answer some of the toughest questions that were thrown there way. Over the last two weeks they have been traveling and hosting a series of SEO workshops in Germany, both in English and German. They are covering topics like: search engine complaint link enhancing strategies, technical on-page optimization, penalty recovery, and building online services focused on real problems of the end users. adana escort kadınlar

Below is how Fili Wiese, Kaspar Szymanski, Jonas Weber, and Ariel Lambrecht responded to a series of questions asked by www.stateofsearch.com:

SEO Myth: Google, as an organization, dislikes SEO people?
Answer: Not at all. In fact good SEO work can help Google improve crawling, indexing and serving your content, which is great for the search engine’s users.

Myth: High authority sites are free to try more shady optimization techniques; right or wrong?
Answer: Wrong. Based on our experience in Google Search Quality every site gets the same treatment.

Myth: Are there any differences in approach to fighting webspam across languages?
Answer: Google Search Quality Guidelines apply in the same way across all language markets. Having said that, there are different nuances in the spamming techniques applied across different geographic regions and the Webspam Fighting Team is capable of addressing these.

Myth: Google likes sites that constantly add fresh content?
Answer: Potentially, yet only if it’s high quality content. Quantity of fresh content is not as important as serving quality content.

Myth: Creating quality content takes too much time and is too expensive. Why should I invest in this?
Answer: Creating quality content may take some effort indeed. However, you need to think of your long term strategy rather than short term revenue. High quality content is an investment in the future. Great quality sources address the issues your users have. Often you may find that sharing expertise on specific problems can be enough to create quality content. Often the primary cost is to sit down and create a solution for a problem that users have been looking for.

Myth: Internal links anchor text; important or not?
Answer: Yes, internal linking is important. Particularly, it enhances the ability to navigate around a site for your users. This is what you should optimise for.

Myth: Can AdSense ads ever hurt your rankings?
Answer: Overloading a site with commercial content like ads can have an impact on a site’s visibility in natural search engine results. This is not limited to any particular advertising system.

Myth: I see other websites using weird characters like ♥ ♫ ♣ in their meta descriptions, which in turn show in the search results snippets. Should I do the same to increase CTR?
Answer: This is a known technique to try to attract attention in the SERP’s. That said, ask yourself, would these characters help users to understand what your site is about? We tend to believe they would not.

Myth: Big sites get preferential treatment when it comes to reconsideration requests.
Answer: No. The reality is that big websites often have well documented what they did and have often much more manpower to tackle the problem. Therefore, a bigger organisation can be quicker in resolving an issue and can apply for reconsideration sooner than a smaller one. If you need help with a reconsideration issue, you can go to the Google Webmaster Forums for free advice or hire a professional SEO expert.

Myth: Not linking to other websites (passing PageRank or not); is that a good practice or not?
Answer: Ask yourself, would you trust a scientific report without any citations to other scientific sources? Most likely not. We recommend to link out to sources you trust and are relevant to the content of your site. When you are unsure of the trustworthiness of the source, or someone paid for the link or it’s user generated content including outgoing links, go ahead and apply the nofollow attribute, just to be on the safe side.

Myth: Being a customer of Google AdWords helps you with rankings in organic search.
Answer: The only answer to this is: No, No, No! This is one of the oldest myths. Google Search and other Google products, like for example Google AdWords, are completely separated from each other. It is crucial for all of them to remain completely independent. Changing your AdWords budget will not have any effect on getting your site out of a penalty or change the algorithmic evaluation of your website.

Myth: There is cap of incoming natural search traffic per site, per day, right?
Answer: No. Google will display your site in the search results as often as it is relevant to search queries their users type in.

The biggest myth I think they put to rest is Pay Per Click helps with your organic rankings. What is most telling about that is that a ton of people think they have to spend money on a pay per click campaign to enhance their SEO rankings. According to the above transcript and the data that we have built over years of experience we have shown no correlation to PPC and SEO rankings.

*Image and Transcript of the Q and A is from www.stateofsearch.com