Thought this was a good thread, and held a nice accord of the many beliefs and myths that have been spread throughout the SEO/SEM industry through time. There are a good number of myths out there, so much so its almost necessary to identify them in order not to make the same mistakes again. As I have long believed just because a particular method is used by many, could be one of the best reasons for not continuing it. There is an active thread over at SEW forums detailing the some of the SEO myths that have been spread about SEO through time. Some are quite hilarious, such as "AdWords are moving to the left of the screen." or "You can outsmart Google by using hidden text".
To sum up some of the real myths about SEO/SEM, here is a fun list from the thread with some I added in as well:
- There is a right way to optimize
- There are a million search engines
- There are a 10,000 search engines
- Google is the only search engine
- Google hates me
- Stuff keywords in your comment tags
- PageRank is everything
- Your should repeated your keywords 100 times on the page
- You will not get caught for spam
- Automate your site submission to 15,000 search engines
- There's a perfect keyword density to achieve high rankings
- The reason you are not ranking well is because you need more/better metatags
- Page Rank is dead
- All you need is more links
- People on SEO forums know more about SEO
- Sitewide links do not work
- Google was created by space aliens
- SEO does not require patience
- New sites don't have a chance in the search engines
