I was flicking through the television channels the other day and caught a five minute glimpse of an old Oprah Winfrey show. The topic was “things I know for sure but can’t prove”. I thought it would be a great idea to relate this to SEO, therein lies this blog post inspiration. There’s a whole bunch of things I can prove in SEO, but there are some things I know for sure, but have absolutely no proof to back it up. So here is my top 5 list of things I know for sure in SEO but can’t prove.
- 1.)Having certain affiliate codes on your page will kill your rankings. I know for sure that the moment Google sees a clickbank affiliate code your page is going to suffer. This screams low quality and Google is onto it. I mean think about it, how often do you see an awesome article that has a clickbank link at the end of it? I have tried promoting clickbank products here and there but have limited success. Try having the article online with NO clickbank affiliate code and BINGO, expect much better rankings.
- 2.) Affiliate codes on brand new websites are a bad idea. Try launching a brand new website that doesn’t have any reputation, pack it with affiliate codes on the front page and you will see what I mean. When Google crawls your website for the first time and sees affiliate codes on your website you can for sure expect shocking rankings in the SERPS. I have played around a few times with this to the point where I am 100% convinced. Brand new websites should spend the first year at least trying to gain trust. Again I have no solid evidence and I’m sure there are probably people out there that would argue with me on this, that’s the beauty of this blog post. I don’t have to have proof
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- 3.) Keyword stuffing is ok if all the keywords are related. For example if I stuff a webpage with keywords like; seo company Guelph, Guelph seo company, ppc company Canada, Canadian ppc company etc etc. Google doesn’t punish this. If the keywords are unrelated, that’s when you have issues. For example boiler repairs, kitchen furnishings, dragon tattoos. Etc.
- 4.) Twitter mentions no longer factor in the Google algorithms. They use to when Google still had access to Twitter’s firehose, but since Google no longer renewed the licence I just know they have pulled the plug on using twitter as social media metrics. Back in the glory days I could tweet a link from my website and Google would crawl and index it within minutes. These days if I was to do the same it has absolutely no effect on Google. I know they are going to put all their resources into Google+, I mean why wouldn’t they?
- 5.) Google uses noFollow links to determine rankings. Maybe not as much as a dofollow but I have always believed that nofollow backlinks do help boost rankings. I have no proof of this, and I’m sure you can find hundreds of SEO blogs saying otherwise, but I can’t be swayed.
Feel free to add to this list in the comment section below.