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Expired, Never True, or Misunderstood
Three categories cover almost all of it. Some tactics genuinely worked and stopped. Some were never real and spread because they sounded plausible. And some are real mechanisms that get described wrongly, which is the most damaging kind because arguing against them makes you look wrong.
The distinction is practically useful because it tells you how to respond. An expired tactic needs a date attached: it worked until the mechanism changed. A fabrication needs a source check. A misunderstood mechanism needs precision rather than contradiction, because the person is half right and will notice if you overcorrect.
Things That Were True Once
These describe real mechanics of an earlier search engine. They circulate because the people repeating them learned something accurate and never rechecked, which is a much more sympathetic failure than invention.
| Belief | When it was true | What replaced it |
|---|---|---|
| Keyword density targets | When retrieval matched strings | Meaning-based retrieval, per semantic search |
| Meta keywords tag | Very early web; ignored by Google since 2009 | Nothing; it was abandoned as unreliable |
| Exact-match domains | When the domain string carried weight | Brand entity clarity, per entity SEO |
| More pages is better | When coverage was scarce | Per-page assessment, per page-level authority |
| Link volume as the goal | Before link quality assessment matured | Relevance and corroboration, per how to get backlinks |
| FAQ schema for visibility | Until FAQ rich results were withdrawn in May 2026 | Nothing visible, per structured data in 2026 |
The FAQ row is the most recent and worth noting because it shows the process happening in real time. It was accurate advice until May 2026, is now wrong, and will circulate as accepted wisdom for years. That is how every other row on this table got here.
Things That Were Never True
These have no historical version. They spread because they sound like how a search engine ought to work, and because in several cases somebody had something to sell.
- The duplicate content penalty.
Google has denied this for over a decade. Duplication causes URL selection problems and split signals, which are real costs and not sanctions, per duplicate content.
- Submitting your site to search engines.
There is no queue. Submitting a sitemap in Search Console helps discovery; services offering submission to hundreds of engines are selling a process that does not exist, per XML sitemaps.
- Bounce rate and time on page as ranking signals.
Google does not have your analytics and does not use those metrics. Optimising them for ranking is optimising something the ranking systems cannot see.
- Domain authority as a Google metric.
It belongs to a tool vendor and Google has never used it. The correlation has a simpler explanation, set out in domain authority.
- A published list of 200 ranking factors.
The number came from an offhand remark and the lists were assembled by publishers, as examined in Google ranking factors.
- Competitors can spam-link you out of the rankings.
Google largely discounts untrusted links rather than penalising the target, which is the only stable design. The attacks that genuinely work are different, per negative SEO.
Things That Are Real but Misdescribed
The hardest category, because contradicting them makes you look wrong. The mechanism exists; the description attached to it does not.
E-E-A-T is real and is not a ranking factor: it is a concept from the rater guidelines describing what Google aims to reward, which is a meaningfully different thing from a dial you can turn, as covered in author entities. YMYL is real and is not a penalty class; it describes stakes, per YMYL.
Topical authority is real as a description of coverage and is not a score anyone publishes, per topical authority. Core updates are real and are not penalties, so there is nothing to appeal, per the algorithm history. And AI visibility is real while most of what is sold to achieve it, including files no crawler requests, is not, per our review of llms.txt.
A Test for Advice You Have Not Seen Before
Rather than memorising a list of myths, which will itself expire, three questions handle most claims. What is the mechanism? What year did it start working? And who benefits if I believe it?
The mechanism question is the strongest. Anyone who understands why something works can explain the mechanism, and anyone repeating a received tactic cannot. "Google rewards longer content" has no mechanism; "longer pages tend to cover more of what a reader needs, and coverage is what gets assessed" has one, and the second version also tells you when it would not apply.
The beneficiary question catches the commercial cases. If believing a claim requires buying a specific service, and the claim cannot be verified by the buyer, that combination has produced most of the durable myths in this field. Files nobody reads, scores nobody uses, and submissions to queues that do not exist all share that shape.
Questions About SEO Myths
- Is there a duplicate content penalty?
No, and there never was in the sense people mean. Google has said so consistently for over a decade. Duplication causes a selection problem, where Google picks one URL to represent a set and it may not be the one you wanted, plus split signals and wasted crawling. Those are real costs and none of them is a sanction.
- Does keyword density matter?
No. Google has said directly that it is not something the systems focus on, and it stopped being useful once retrieval moved from matching strings to representing meaning. Writing to hit a density target makes the page slightly worse for the reader in exchange for nothing measurable.
- Do I need to submit my site to search engines?
Not in the way the phrase implies. There is no submission queue to join. What genuinely helps is submitting a sitemap in Search Console so Google knows your URLs exist, and having at least one link from an indexed page. Services selling submission to hundreds of engines are selling something that does not exist.
- Is bounce rate a ranking factor?
No. Google does not have access to your analytics and does not use those metrics as ranking inputs. Engagement may be inferred from other data available to Google, but the specific numbers on your dashboard are not signals, and optimising them for ranking purposes optimises the wrong thing.
- How do I tell whether advice is out of date?
Ask what year the tactic worked and what mechanism made it work. Most bad SEO advice is expired rather than invented: it described something real about an earlier version of search. If a source cannot say why something works, or points at a mechanism that no longer exists, that is the tell.
