I always have a good chuckle when I read all of the things posted in forums by so called “experts”. Some examples are the words of “wisdom” that are routinely handed out as factual when they are nowhere to be found in any official or authoritative document or website that you can find anywhere. Take Google for example. You can hear some strange and wild stiff out there, and most of it has to do with Google being a big, ugly, unreasonable monster that wants to stand between you and success. I personally believe that they are toatally uninterested in you. I think that they are and always will be acting in whatever manner is necessary to retain their share of the search market and keep up their Adsense revenues. If that happens to disrupt your plans, I don’t think Google really cares. So it may seem that they are personally trying to foil you at every turn, but that is unlikely at least and probably impossible. So that brings me to the topic at hand, and that is Google myths that you are likely to hear. To give you an example, let me tell you about something that affected me recently. I had heard and thought I knew that there would be seo penalties for redirecting an old url to a new site, and I was worried becuase I was in a situation that called for just that. I consulted with some friends that I consider to be experts, and generally they felt the same way. But the next day I decided to do some research before throwing out the baby with the bathwater and this is what I found in the Google guidelines: “If you need to change the URL of a page as it is shown in search engine results, we recommended that you use a server-side 301 redirect. This is the best way to ensure that users and search engines are directed to the correct page. The 301 status code means that a page has permanently moved to a new location. 301 redirects are particularly useful in the following circumstances: * You’ve moved your site to a new domain, and you want to make the transition as seamless as possible. To implement a 301 redirect for websites that are hosted on servers running Apache, you’ll need access to your server’s .htaccess file. (If you’re not sure about your access or your server software, check with your webhoster.) For more information, consult the Apache .htaccess Tutorial and the Apache URL Rewriting Guide. If your site is hosted on a server running other software, check with your hoster for more details.” Now I could have sworn that there were penalties for doing this, but apparently at least for Google that is not the case. If you would have asked me I would have given you the wrong answer yesterday, thinking I was right on the money. Why did I think that? I probably thought I had researched it but obviously that is not the case, so where did it come from? I probably read it someplace or heard it from someone I respected, and took it in as truth. That is how easy it is to be mislead and then in turn to mislead others. So this time the laugh could be on me- I was way off base until I did about 5 minutes of searching and another 5 reading what Google has to say. Here is the point- make sure you know that the advice you give is accurate, because there are many willing listeners who sill act on it. In this case it could have very well been me giving the bad advice and that to me is not acceptable. Related articles by Zemanta
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