Take Free SEO Advice With a Grain of Salt

Yesterday I've spotted again how jokes become rumors. It happens every day and sometimes it even hurts. In my post The Top-5 Methods to Attract Search Engine Spiders I was joking about bold dollar signs driving the MSN bot crazy. A few days later I discovered the first Web site making use of the putative '$$-trick'. To make a sad story worse, the webmaster has put the dollar signs as hidden text.

This reminds me to the spreading of the ghostly robots revisit META tag. This tag was used by a small regional canadian engine for local indexing in the stone age of the Internet. Today every free META tag generator on the net produces a robots revisit tag. Not a single search engine is interested in this tag. It was never standardized. But it's present on billions of Web pages.

This is how bad advice becomes popular. Folks read nasty tips and tricks on the net and don't apply common sense when they implement it. There is no such thing as free and good advice on the net. Even good advice on a particular topic can result in astonishing effets when applied outside its context. It's impossible to learn SEO from free articles and posts on message boards. Go see a SEO, it's worth it.

Tags: Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

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