SES Berlin 2010: SEO Mythbusters
Search Engine Optimisation

SES Berlin 2010: SEO Mythbusters

24th November 2010

Good morning everyone! Welcome back to another session at SES Berlin 2010. The next session of the day is called “SEO Mythbusters” – and the panel looks pretty awesome: We do have Martin Sinner (Idealo) who will be moderating and as panelists there are Heiko Eckert (bigmouthmedia), Ralph Tegtmeier (fantomaster), Johannes Beus (Sistrix) and Dominik Wojcik (Rocket Internet). Nice!

Not sure, but from what I think (at least this happened last year) everyone of the panelists will share one (or maybe more…) of their favorite SEO myths and afterwards this session will turn into a Q&A. So I’m trying to cover those and some of the interesting questions and of course the answers from the panel. Let’s go!

Here we go – Martin introduces the panel… but doesn’t know what the conference language is. Haha, nice. Martin, we’re in Germany – it’s German of course 😉

High page rank = top rankings: Completely not true, Dominik states that the PR is more or less useless. At least as a single metric. Johannes adds that it’s not that simple – if you do have a site and want to boost 80.000 sites into the Google index it’s not possible with a PR 0. So yes, as a metric in correlation with others, you can look at it. But pay attention if a domain had a PR and gets “N/A” shown – that might be not so good 😉

Meta keywords are important: Martin asks the question if someone believes in keywords – no one raises their hands. OK we skip that one, crystal clear.

AdWords placements / bookings do correlate with your rankings: OK that one was easy – all panelists agree on that not being the case.

W3C validation does help you with your rankings: Dominik is first and clearly states that this one does not help. Johannes adds that not even the Google start page being valid this truly is not the case. This was also confirmed by Google.

Submission services in “12.000” search engines: Nooope… you don’t need that sh*t.

Google knows about every paid link: Great statement on this by Ralph which is not FSK 18 – can’t post it though. LOL! Johannes adds that you really need to be careful, don’t buy links that are obviously paid – this will be detected and penalized.

Good content does need no links: Dominik states that you need links, no matter what. Without is doesn’t work – but obviously it depends on the competition. If it’s really long tail maybe it works without – but otherwise not.

Links cannot harm your (existing) rankings: Johannes says that there definitely are links that can harm. So don’t believe in that propaganda out there and make sure you keep a close eye on your inbound links! Ralph mentions that – using tools like xrumor – you surely can kill a domain within days.

Keywords within the URL-path help with rankings: Nope, but it’s about conversion – so make sure you have those keys in there to make people click.

In Dublin (or Mountain View) are people manually defining settings for a domain: Ralph says that a least sometimes it looks like there a hand-jobs in place – especially on very high-competitive markets. Johannes notes that Google really wants to do such things using an algorithm, everything else would be way too much work. So generally it’s better for them do find technical solutions on these issues.

Really good session – thanks to the panelists! I’m out for the lunch break – make sure to check back later for the afternoon coverage here on StateOfSearch.

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Bastian Grimm is founder and CEO of Grimm Digital. He mainly works as online marketing consultant with a strong focus on organic search engine optimization (SEO). Grimm specializes in SEO strategy consulting, website assessments as well as large scale link building campaigns.
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