Even though Google’s algorithm is a well kept secret, noone knows exactly what works and what doesn’t. I guess that’s why there seems to be a number of myths going round which will not help optimise your website for search engines. Here are a number of them;

FALSE: The more traffic you get, the higher your ranking will be.

Google or any other search engine has no idea how much traffic you get. A high traffic website being at the top of a number of search page rankings is because it has been deemed the most relevant and I’m sure a large number of this traffic is coming from search engines anyway.

FALSE: A .PHP extension will be penalized compared to a .HTML extension.

Spiders will only look at the name of the page and it’s content, its extension won’t matter.

FALSE: Flash websites do not get indexed.

Flash websites do get indexed because of the title of the page, file name and any html content. However, Flash websites are at a great disadvantage because of the lack of html content and the fact it’s simply just one page. If you do want a well optimised website, you’re not going to get it with Flash.

FALSE: You will get penalized for having too many hypens in your URL because search engines will blacklist it as spam

Personally I’m not a fan of website-that-use-a-lot-of-hyphens-like-this because it is far too long to type and can look unattractive. No search engine will penalize you for this, no matter how much it looks like a spam website. However, make sure you’re not keyword stuffing as you can be blacklisted for that.

FALSE: You must include meta tags as they are very valuable.

This myth came about because a few years ago, meta tags were quite valuable for search engine optimisation but now, not so much. I think it’s still a good idea to include them because every little helps, however it’s not too much of a loss to not include them.

FALSE: ‘We can guarantee we can get your website at the top for x keyword’.

No company other than the search engines themselves can guarantee anything because they can not predict future results (it is a better idea for companies to use case studies to showcase how well they work instead). Sometimes this is said because the way some companies manage a top listing is by using spam-like methods which will put the website at the top for a very short period, fulfilling the contract and then the website will diminish amongst the other sites soon after.

FALSE: Instant High Rankings.

Unless you are aiming for a very obscure keyword it will take a rather long time to achieve a high ranking for a popular keyword. Beneficial SEO uses a lot of experimentation, research and work to see what works best and to get necessary backlinks which will help increase your listing rank.

FALSE: Websites with a .com TLD are considered more relevant than x.

The only reason this is thought is because there are far more .com domains than any other, therefore there is more chance that a .com domain is going to be well ranked.

FALSE: Hiding text on your website will increase your rankings for those keywords.

If your site is perceived to contain hidden text and links that are deceptive in intent, your site may be removed from the Google index, and will not appear in search results pages. When evaluating your site to see if it includes hidden text or links, look for anything that’s not easily viewable by visitors of your site. Are any text or links there solely for search engines rather than visitors?

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66353

FALSE: Outbound links effect your ranking.

Some people have suggested that having a large number of outbound links on your website causes a ‘PR Leak’ and effectively reduces your search engine rankings. However many case studies have revealed that is in fact the opposite, a number of outbound links has helped increase rankings.

Knowing what doesn’t work in search engine optmisation is as valuable as knowing what does work, so hopefully these have helped you.