Over and over again … the same topics keep sprouting up in the SEO industry. And that’s especially true if you’re looking for any sort of beginner advice. There’s literally no end to this craze.
So today, we’re looking into the four top topics in SEO that just need to die already!
1. Black Hat SEO vs. White Hat SEO
The war of black hat vs. white hat is a bit weird to say the least. For some reason, SEOs have decided to categorizes SEO practices into two groups based on how much a given technique is in tune with Google’s guidelines.
What’s strange about it is that Google openly admits, and does so very often, that they disapprove of every practice that’s meant to result in an artificial advantage in the rankings. Therefore, there’s no such thing as an SEO technique that Google thinks is fine.
Moreover, looking at what’s usually labeled “black hat SEO,” you’ll quickly realize that there’s nothing inherently wrong with those techniques (apart from a handful of truly illegal practices like hacking sites or getting on someone else’s server in some other way).
A much better idea, instead of black hat vs. white hat, would be to classify SEO techniques as those that don’t work and those that do.
2. H1 Tags
Really, how many times can we listen to someone teaching us to “adjust our H1 tags” before we go mad? This is probably the most overused piece of SEO advice out there. You surely heard it at least a thousand times.
(This actually goes for any HX-tag conversation, not just H1’s.)
Here’s where this originated from. Back in the day, when WordPress wasn’t around or it wasn’t that popular yet, very few sites used the H1 tags properly. In most cases, you had to include them manually by going into the HTML code of the page.
Nowadays, however, this is all handled by WordPress by default, so there’s no need for anyone to keep reminding us to use those tags.
3. All Kinds of Posts Like “What the _____ Google Algorithm Update Means for SEO”
So we’ve had Panda, Penguin, Pigeon, etc. And every time a new update got released, not later than a day afterwards there was some self-proclaimed SEO expert talking about what that update meant for SEO from then on out.
Basically, the merits of what the expert was saying didn’t matter that much. What did matter, however, was how soon after the update the post could go live. The only thing that those experts wanted was to be the first person ranking for the keywords “new-animal-name update”.
Please, all SEO experts out there, don’t publish those posts merely five minutes after an update goes live. You can’t possibly know what the update brings to the table at that point.
4. SEO is Dead
Every time! Literally, every time a new update gets released, or every time Matt Cutts says something significant, there’s this one guy/gal that starts the “SEO is dead” discussion.
It clearly isn’t. It will never be. As long as we have Google or whatever comes next, we’ll have SEO as well.