Meta Tags will affect your site's rankings

By meta tags, I'm referring to the 'keyword' and 'Description' meta tags, not all meta tags in general. It's possible 5 years ago that this was true. When meta tags were first introduced and began gaining grounds, search engines used them to determine keywords for a site, as well as to determine what the site was about in general. It wasn't long, however, before people would put meaningless and irrelevant keywords into their meta tags to try to trick the search engines into ranking them higher for keywords the site had nothing to do with. As a result, most search engines place little to no weight on your meta tags generally. A few will still use the Description to place the little intro-blurb on the search results page, however they don't do much beyond this.

Regardless, it only takes a few moments to add meta tags to your site, so it should still be done, most SEO experts agree. Just don't expect the addition of meta tags to do much for your site in terms of gaining higher ranking for the keywords you've used.

Doorway and Gateway Pages can increase your rankings

I will say little more than the use of Doorway and Gateway pages is expressely forbidden by all search engines, and if "caught" you risk being delisted completely. Generally, people try to setup a gateway page that is very keyword rich and specific to a subject, to get high rankings for those keywords in search engines. Then, when a human visitor visits the page, they are redirected to a site or page completely different from the one the search engine sees.

This is underhanded, annoying, spam - and human visitors don't like this. Search engines are getting smarter too, so don't think you can outfool them forever either.

Setting up multiple domain names can help your site

The theory is if you have 5 domain names highly targeted to your specific content, but the domain names are slightly different, they can capture more search engine rank that would be delivered elsewhere. For example mustangcars.com and fordmustangs.com (just random domain names) - they are similar, but the use of ford in one and cars in the other might help to pull in slightly alternative searches.

In reality, the domain names have little weight in the eyes of the spider, and worse if the two sites are identical, you risk a mirror-content penalty. Mirrored content is frowned upon by spiders, and your site can be delisted if this is found. Further to that, you are spreading incoming links and link weight across two "separate" sites, rather than building it all into one site.

Focus your time and effort on one good site, rather than multiple sites you are attempting to make look good. It will pay off better in the end, and you'll spend much less time and effort to boot.

You should submit your site to search engines regularly

The search engines even tell you not to do this, unless a page has significantly changed. Even then, the spiders are designed to regularly crawl your site, so resubmitting is almost never necessary.

A better alternative is to general a Google or Yahoo sitemap which will stay dynamically (or manually, if necessary) updated which you should submit just once to the search engines. You can even hint at how often the pages change with a Google sitemap, so it will have an idea of how often it should crawl those pages for updates. This is a much better alternative, and requires much less time and effort.

Do not, under any circumstances, sign up for a service where you pay to submit your site to multiple search engines at once. In reality, there are about 5-10 major search engines that everyone uses - manually submit to these search engines if you feel so inclined.

(We here at CommunitySEO have not manually submitted to any search engines, however we have submitted a Google sitemap to Google in the Webmaster Tools area).

You will get banned for 'Google Bombing'

Google bombing is the practice of submitting your site to Google's listings over and over and over repeatedly. If this were true, all anyone would have to do to get the #1 search results position is go resubmit repeatedly their competitors sites. Google isn't this stupid - they know anyone can submit a site, not just the site owner.

Being linked to on a Link Farm will hurt your rankings

Again, this comes down to common sense - anyone can link to anyone on the internet. There is no acceptance guidelines to being linked. So all I'd have to do to hurt my competitors is setup a link farm page somewhere and link to all of them with a lot of bad SEO practices and I'd drag them down, pushing myself up by effect.

Google realizes you have no control over who links to you. Instead of hurting your rankings, the inbound links simply have little or no relevance or weight.

HTML pages are better than dynamic pages (e.g. .php)

Rankings have nothing to do with your page extension. This myth is probably mostly perpetuated by the fact that (1) there are more .html and .htm pages than anything else on the web, so statistics will push these pages to the top alone, and (2) many dynamic pages have more than one url that point to the same page, spreading weight across multiple "urls" that are truly the same page, where-as this issue doesn't happen with a static url that has no query strings.

Search engines care about the content, not the extension.



There are of course many other myths, and I would be glad to give my views, and or share research and findings I can come up with if anyone has any more they'd like to inquire about - either true or false assumptions.

Some links:
http://www.practical...t-Optimization/
http://www.dotcult.c...ommon-sense-seo
http://www.rankforsa.../seo-myths.html
http://www.searcheng...5/0120_jw1.html
http://www.mainframe...aste-your-time/

Most insightful. Cheers mate.