A very common misconception that drives me nuts is the notion of Guruness and Ninja-qualities in SEO. Dealing with an algorithm is not meditation, it’s not throwing shurikens and it’s not even slightly wizard-related. No wands or staves are ever used.
I honestly didn’t learn much at the science engineering program I attended back in the university days but I did learn one thing. How to cheat in computer games. Or at least exploit them. Every opponent in all the computer games were AI (I still have a hard time accepting that term for something so stupid). Google is the same kind of opponent and will react in the same way every time if given the same stimuli. That’s just the way it is!
How many times have you been visiting a conference and heard some Guru-ninja-anarchist go on and on about the next shiny thing, using midwife stories and stuff they heard from the guy reading the electricity meter? I’ve had to listen to this more times than not and it goes a little something like this:
Make great content and it will get the positon it deserves in the search engines or social media is the most important factor in SEO or Google bombs are impossible now.
Where do all the myths come from? I’m aware Google start a lot of rumors themselves but come on people, don’t you ever test anything? True, it’s hard to test anything properly in an ever changing enviroment but you can’t just pull crap out of the backside and pretend it’s how it’s done.