SEO Facts That Will Leave You Gobsmacked

In business, we like to believe that we have a pretty good idea of how the world works. But, even in something as seemingly cut-and-dry as SEO, many of us don’t have the full story.

In this post, we’re going to take a look at some of the SEO facts that will leave you gobsmacked and wondering how you could get it so wrong. 

User Proximity Is More Important Than Link Building

Have you ever typed a brand-related query such as “plumbers near me” into Google and browsed the results? 

If you have, then you may have noticed something quite interesting: some of the businesses that come up don’t even have websites, let alone inbound links or quality content.

It turns out that it isn’t your imagination that things are upside down - that really is how the search engine works. 

It all comes back to a patent Google filed several years ago. The idea was to create a ranking system that accounted for the “time investment” that an individual would have to put into accessing a service. So if they searched for “local restaurants,” Google would show them anything nearby, not just eateries with loads of blogs and inbound links from review sites. 

Google Doesn’t Penalize You For Duplicate Content

Hold on. Wait a sec - isn’t duplicate content the one thing you should never do?

It sounds crazy, but it is true - Google really won’t penalize you for duplicate content.

The confusion comes from the fact that the search giant does penalize copied content. But there’s a difference between copied and duplicate. 

Let’s say you go to an SEO agency and ask them to set you up with a nice, shiny, new website that uses the HTTPS standard. But let’s also suppose you’ve done years of work building links to your old HTTP site. HTTPS is better, but not if it comes at the expense of abandoning all your HTTP-based content. 

Well, it turns out that Google doesn’t actually mind if you copied content from one page to another. So long as you’re the originator, you can plaster it over as many business-related websites as you like. If you’re worried, you can tell Google it is duplicate content, and you’re the owner. 

Inbound Links Don’t Matter On Some Search Engines

Every SEO knows that link-building is the core of search engine optimization. If you don’t build links, how does a search engine know if you offer anything valuable? 

Well, it turns out that some services no longer consider links. Yandex, Russia’s primary search engine, doesn’t give two hoots if thousands of authority sites link to your pages. It makes no difference. 

The SERP took this step because of the sheer level of black hat activity in the country. People were linking from junk sites left, right and center, and just paying for links by the thousand. Yandex, therefore, did the only thing it could: use other metrics as barometers of site value. And users thanked it. 

So, have you learned something about your firm’s? 

---

Love it, share it. Pin it.