3 Things Most People Do Not Know About SEO
The SEO world is highly complicated, much more than most people think. And the truth is that internet marketers from around the world do not really want you to know everything they do. If you would know their information, you wouldn’t hire SEO agencies.
The truth is that you do need SEO services for every single website out there. Even medical practices need them. But, we are here to talk about some things even some SEO specialists do not know.
You Are Not Penalized Because Of Duplicate Content
While duplicate content can hurt your website in some circumstances, you will not be penalized because of it. This is just one of the very common SEO misconceptions most people still think are true.
Copied content is different than duplicate content. It is the copied content that can get you penalized.
Duplicate content can only hurt SEO when it is intentionally used to manipulate rankings in one way or another. The trick is just to use canonical tags. The only think that Google actually does is reward the fully unique content and positive user experience.
Links Are Not Ranking Factors For All Search Engines
The largest search engine in Russia is Yandex. It is still very popular among SEO specialists who try to rank commercial websites because it is easy to spam, mostly because of its huge reliance on backlinks. As a result, Yandex changed its algorithm so that backlinks were removed. This is something that might actually be done by other search engines in the future.
Google admitted that it performed internal tests to see how results would look like without backlink relevance. While at the moment there are no plans to make this a reality, we cannot dismiss it. This is why the focus of every single good SEO campaign has to be on creating the best possible unique content.
Rich Snippets Do Not Directly Impact Rankings
The goal of the rich snippet is to add some extra information to the search engine listing. It does not actually influence rankings. This is something that Google stated several times and people still do not think this is correct. However, we can say that there are some indirect benefits. For instance, it helps the page to be indexed faster while showing extra useful data that readers can take advantage of.
Basically, rich snippets help but do it indirectly. They help to increase website traffic, which can also lead to a faster increase in rankings. But, the rich snippet does not directly impact ranking.
Final Thoughts
At the end of the day, SEO is all about experimenting, seeing what works, and what does not work. What we know right now is that the main search engine, Google, is focused on quality content, in one way or another. So, it is really important to focus on that. Content marketing is a huge part of modern SEO and will surely remain that. But, we all have to keep an open mind since there are always other things that will help and that have to be taken into account by the SEO specialist.