This article is about the biggest SEO myths and misunderstanding.

They can be a big hindrance in your ability to make money online with search engine optimization. These misunderstandings can hinder your abilities to evaluate potential consultants that help your companies. A lot of them will propagate a lot of these myths and misunderstandings. They just do not know any better, and there is a lot of regurgitation of what other people are talking about that goes on in the SEO industry.

For someone like me who is flexible, who takes a scientific approach about it, questions what is real, and forms my own judgments with my own tests and what is really happening, there are a lot of things I have identified. most of the people I know who are really good a SEO understand this, but there are a lot of people who are mediocre at SEO and know a little bit — enough to think they know more than they really do. Anyway, let’s start talking about SEO myths now!

Myth 1: Content marketing is SEO – the biggest SEO myths

This is a big SEO Myth that has been propagating for a long time, and it is plain silly.

First of all, content marketing is not SEO. Content marketing is content marketing. Here is an article talking about what is SEO and how it works.

If you do not know what content marketing is, it is where you try to create great content that naturally gets shared. This is what Google says you should do, but Google is far from straight forward. Essentially, people say, “Hey, you just build a bunch of great content and then people will come and you will get SEO value for it.”

While that can work and can make you money, it is not SEO. It can be a part of an SEO plan if it is something that fits your business, but again, it is not SEO.

Not only that, it is not the only path for SEO. There are lots of different paths, and while it is good to create good content, ti is not necessarily a good plan to say, “Hey, I am just going to create great content and then people will come.” That is not true. That is not how it works. It can work, but in general, it does not work or it is very expensive and takes a very long time.

Focusing exclusively on content marketing for your SEO is not the best path for most business — especially local businesses. There are some businesses for which it is a very good path, and it can be one of the most profitable, or the most profitable, for them, but that is a tiny percentage of the businesses. The reason for this is that it takes a very long time to get the ROI. A lot of these content marketing things, unless you get really lucky, take a year or three to even start seeing an ROI, if you are going to see an ROI. Sometimes people wills pend two years, they will hire someone full-time to pump out content on a regular basis, and they will get nothing that whole time. Essentially, there are more efficient ways to rank safely.

Yes, building great content is good, but you want to put it in the context of a bigger SEO plan that really understands what your market is searching, and how to target that, and how to structure a site around great content, so that Google maximizes the possibility for you to rank for the search phrases, but also so Google understands it in a organized manner. That is harder to put together and harder to understand, but ends up providing far more value to your SEO. The other thing is, it is a dime-a-dozen plan. That is what everybody else does, especially the people new to SEO. It is not going to separate you from the pack. Yes, you can have great content and not get results, or you can have mediocre content and get great results, if you know what you are doing.

Myth 2: White Hat and Black Hat SEO

This is another one of the big SEO myths propagated by just about everybody. Only the best people I know understand this on a fundamental level, and they all say the same thing: there is no such thing as white hat, black hat, grey hat. All SEO is essentially black hat, because as soon as you do anything that is related to building a link or trying to think about SEO at all, and putting it on your site, you are officially breaking Google’s terms of services.The fact that people say, “Oh, black hat, white hat. Oh, I am always white hat SEO,” you are going to immediately cross him of the list because they do not know what they are talking about.

They are doing that because people have an emotional response to it, and there are a lot of clients that come to me and say, “Oh, well, of course, someone who uses black hat is going to say this is true.” No, I am saying this because it is true. All SEO is black hat.

Here is what you get. You have 100,000 judges who are ignorant about SEO, who really do not know SEO on an experienced level, and they are getting this message from a handful of authorities, and it has grown over the years, so now it is “an ethical or moral judgment.” If you do not do what is officially labeled as white hat (despite it still being technically black hat sometimes), then you are a bad person, or you are doing something completely wrong, or it increases your chances of getting penalized, while none of this is true. You can get penalized for what is officially white hat, but I have also seen lots of people who are officially black hat skate through. It is a horrible metric to measure things, and all the best people I know say, “No hat SEO.” That is what I do. That is what they do.

I always try to ask: What works? What makes sense? What is legal?

Not: What are these ignorant bloggers defining as the “correct” way to do SEO?

There are legal methods. Some people will hack someone’s site to get a link on it. That is obviously illegal, and not something I would recommend you do. The best way, I think, to look at it is quality versus quantity. I am heavily on the side of quality, always quality, quality, quality. As opposed to sending out 100 medium quality links or 1000, or 10,000 medium to low quality links, I would rather do 10, or even just 5, high quality links, and that is going to show in the results. That power has amplified over time. That is a better way. Do you do quality or quantity? That is a better question than, “Do you do white hat SEO?” If someone comes to you and they are really touting white hat SEO they probably do not know a lot about SEO. It is simply a way of hiding their ignorance of all the different things of how really works by waving their hand to make it go away.

A good way to look at it is a spam versus non-spam. I do not like using spam. It has gotten less effective over the years, and this goes back to the quality versus quantity. Again, this is not necessarily an moral judgment. Creating spam does create some waste, but also spam is hard to define, because you can create one piece of content that is spam, and you can create 100 pieces of quality content. Where is the spam line drawn? you can pay someone to make 50,000 blog comments and that is clearly spam. I don’t think that is an ethical or moral judgment, it is just, “Does that work?” It doesn’t really work anymore, and so it is not something I would recommend.

Again, quality over quantity. That is the way to rank in Google going forward. This is a big one, and really understanding this well can take you a long way to understanding what is the best path for you and your business.

Myth 3: Duplicate Content Kills you

I way guilty of this several years ago. While there are certain conditions where that is important, there are many more where duplicate content doesn’t hurt your website at all. Now, if you have a competitor who steals your content, that could be something you want to look at. But that is rare, and usually that does not even come back to bite you. I will explain why.

What is the real way that Google looks at duplicate content? Their main purpose with duplicate content is to not show the same results for the same search phrase. If you are looking at one search phrase and you are number one, and someone comes in and copies your content, and puts it on their site, thinking, “I am going to rank well,” Google will see that and, chances are, they will pick your site and ignore the copier for any of the searches that your content already ranks for.

There are ways to trick Google with this, but chances are good that you’ll never encounter these circumstances.

Let us say you are a plumber in Dallas, and a plumber in Phoenix copies your content and puts it on their site. That is not going to hurt you at all, because you are not competing for the same search phrases. You are competing for “plumber Dallas” and they are competing for “plumber Phoenix.” One of the conditions to avoid is copying direct competitors content, or trying to rank the same content for the same search phrases.

You can actually duplicate your content to your own advantage. One easy way to do this is to create a video and use it as the content for different pages. You can also take your content and copy it, making slight changes on a different page where you are trying to work for a different search phrase. This is something useful and natural. There is nothing wrong with this and it is not something Google will immediately penalize. yes, there are duplicate content ways that Google sees and will penalize, but by and large it is not a huge concern.

Myth 4: Big Social Media Presence is Required to Rank Well

This SEO myths may be true for some businesses. It is industry dependent, but, by and large it is untrue. You have to think of social media as separate from SEO, in that it has its own value in and of itself, and if it has value in and of itself, then it is something you can do, and something that will help for SEO, but not directly. It is not something you do and it helps with your SEO. It is more like, you do it, and you engage your audience and they talk about you online, and that helps with SEO. It is an indirect path to the SEO benefits. That is how it where most of the value of Social Media for SEO comes from.

Here is another thing, Google’s level of tracking on social media is pretty low. I think they do see it to a certain extent, and it is to have a basic social media presence, like I have in the checklist. You almost want to just check it off. They are not really sophisticated about it. Again, they will see a little bit of it, but overall, I do not think it has a big effect now, unless you have none of it, and you are supposed to have some. The most important thing is, if your market is out there on social media and you are looking to interact with them, that is the best thing you can do. Indirectly, that will help with your SEO.

Myth 5: SEO is a Dying Discipline

It seems like with every major update by Google yields people crying, “SEO is dead.” Maybe they had a few sites penalized and they feel, “Oh, not this again.” But with every major update, I see an opportunity, because I am flexible. I am constantly testing and learning, that is just the way I go about it, and so it is almost always an opportunity. Furthermore, I rarely get hurt by the updates. It does happen from time to time, but that is the risk you pay with SEO. There are always ways to adjsut it, and it is getting easier to be able to adjust, and quality over quantity makes it wasy to not be penalized. Since I have gone down that path since 2013, no websites I’ve worked on have got penalized.

SEO is increasing demand, but decreasing in supply. Searchers are not going away. They are still searching.

There is a decreasing supply because a lot of people quit and say, “This is too hard.” Yes, being and SEO is hard. Yes, constantly testing. Yes, having a site that you worked on for a while get drop because of an algorithm change. It is hard, but that doesn’t mean it is not worth it. Your business can make millions of dollars per year from SEO, especially if you have someone who knows their job and you use high quality SEO.

SEO is definitely not going away. People are not going to stop using the seach engines. It is such a unique way to find things, and a powerful way for us to use the Internet. If there were not search engines, how else would you find new things? You would have to go way back to AOL days where you had these little things were created by publishers, and how did they find it? I do not see search engines going away any time soon. It is as fundamental to modern society as running water.

Half-Turth: SEO is a chaotic world of constant change

Apart from the biggest SEO myths mentioned above, there are fundamental SEO principles that have not changed for many years and are not changing any time soon. Google has talked about links. Links are always going to be important, at least for the next 20+ years. Google has tested not using links internally, and it the quality of the result is far worse. That was actually the fundamental difference. There were search engines before Google that did an okay job, but Google was the first ones to come in and use links as a way to measure search results. They were able to give far better search results as a result, and that is a fundamental principle.

There are lots of other fundamental principles I will talk about, but most people do not try to break SEO down to these fundamental principles, so that is why they do no understand it. When you have these fundamental principles, it makes it more timeless. Yes, there might be ups and downs here and there, but if you follow these fundamental principles, overall, things are going to work out for you.

In the future, I will discuss further the fundamental SEO principles and common misunderstandings in more detail.

Question? Please leave a comment below.