SEO Myths

my opinion on these:

• SE won't index pages with query strings/all query strings are not search engines friendly False
• The more links the better False
• Hidden links or text in a page can get your page ranked higher. False
• Too many hyphens in your domain name will cause the search engines to label your site as spam False
• Outbound links improve your ranking True
• Search engines don't index dynamic sites False

Here's my opinion too

• SE won't index pages with query strings/all query strings are not search engines friendly False
• The more links the better True as long as the links are natural (I don't consider directories, article submission, PR etc natural)
• Hidden links or text in a page can get your page ranked higher. True
• Too many hyphens in your domain name will cause the search engines to label your site as spam I've heard lots of conflicting information on this and I have never tested it myself, I don't really know
• Outbound links improve your ranking True, but not a whole lot
• Search engines don't index dynamic sites False

I think "the more links the better" needs to be qualified. More is good, yes, but only if they are quality. Fewer quality links are better than many crappy links. With my personal site as an example: one link from a high quality blog is much more important than thousands of forum signatures.

Other myths:

• A high page rank means that you will get better results in the SERP's
• To improve your page rank, exchange links with other webmasters
• Posting links in forums or directories are a good way to increase your PR

Of course, all of those could be qualified too...

I agree with the high page rank does not equal more search traffic. I have seen lots of websites with low page rank in the 1 to 3 range get top 10 in Google.

I would think that having too many sigs on a forum would be spammy. I wonder if search engines penalize you for this.

Can anybody clarify the term "search engine frienliness"?
I've compared answers of two reputable members of the community and seem to be disagreeing on 3 different points: hidden links, hyphens in the domain name and outtbound links (partially), sowhat are the correct answers here? myths seem to resistant to truth.

SEO is always a mystery. The answers to a lot of questions can only be answered by the people who maintain the algorythms, and they're not telling! So the best the rest of us can do is make an educated guess, and read the work of experts who know more than we do. They also change their algortyms all the time, so what may be true today may not be true next week.

I don't know about hidden links or hidden text but I don't think that's something you would want to try to get away with. I've even read that methods used to replace text headers with a graphic could be a problem for SE's. I have heard that hyphens are better than other characters to separate keywords in a domain name, but that too many hyphenated words is considered spammy (i.e. just trying to get more keywords into the domain - no different than cramming too many keywords into meta tags or something). About outbound links increasing your ranking, I've never heard that before. Associating yourself with relevant content in your niche is good though, so they might use that to place you into a topic area.

Remember the bottom line: SE's are looking for good content for people. To do that, they are looking for genuine ways to tell if a site is valuable. They do not like trickery. If you are doing something to try to trick the SE's into thinking your site is more valuable, then that might be a problem.

That was posted on Aaron Wall's blog not too long ago. I don't thinik he means that these are myths in the sense we're talking about. Just that there are qualifiers attached. Of course you want to create good quality content, nobody is disputing that. But good quality content can't (always) stand on it's own. If another site has better branding and better optimization its content will win out even if it's inferior (note how well wikipedia articles rank).

His creating websites for users bit is really about adveritising. And that's true too. Users would probably prefer no advertising at all, but you've got to cover your costs. And that goes for a lot of what you do with your site - you have to compromise the goals of the user with your own goals. This is a problem I find with usability experts who seem to think that the users goals are the only ones that matter. But, anyway, I don't think he's saying that usability is a myth. It's just that you have to make compromises to cover your own bottom line. There are lots of sites that get away with a ton of advertising and promos (C|net an the like). You have to find the balance that works for your audience.

I don't have an opinion on the other two points he mentioned. Buying links is a sticky subject from what I know. The point about validation is true, but that doesn't mean web standards won't help at all (being clear that validation != web standards)