2010 brought a ton of changes to the search engine optimization industry.  There was tons of progress made by Google, Yahoo, and Bing (and Blekko!) that brought search engine optimization to the next level.  Google Instant was launched, Bing acquired Yahoo, Blekko made some progress into the market share, and other great changes for SEO as a hole.  On top of that, Google has been doing a great job focusing on killing web spam that has been appearing from black hat and grey hat search engine optimizers, and has started a process of making them run for the hills.  All of these SEO changes have made us white hat SEOs excited about 2011.

Unfortunately, the year 2010 was also packed with rumors, lies, and spam being sent across the internet in a hundred different various forms.  This made us legit search engine optimizers scramble to discover the truth among the lies, and also at times to calm down our clients and customers who thought it was the end of the world for their websites.  The amount of times I've had to answer these rumors are incredible, and so I'm here to put a stop to the most annoying and frustrating SEO rumors in 2010.

Here are the top 5 search engine optimization rumors of 2010:

1. SEO is dead.

With each new Google algorithm change, each new announcement from any of the search engines, someone always posted a blog announcing that, "SEO is dead!"  Well, this never really amounted to anything except a few laughs from us SEOs who knew better.  Inevitably, 2011 will bring more people out of the woodworks crying wolf that SEO is dead.  I can't wait.

2. Treating your customers like crap and getting them to post bad reviews about your services will not lead to more links, and then better search results.

Treating your customers like crap will not benefit your company - ever.  Bad reviews won't ever lead to better results for two key reasons; first, they're bad reviews.  People are using peer reviews more and more online during their purchasing decisions, and having bad reviews about your business is bad.  Period.  Second, most of the major review sites use "no follows" on the links to your website, which means you're not getting any Page Rank credit, or anchor text pass through from the reviews anyway.

3. Google's web spam team is asleep at the wheel.

I've read a ton of blog posts and chatter throughout 2010 that Google's web spam team (Matt Cutts and others) were asleep at the wheel.  Just because non-intelligent SEOs were angry about something or other doesn't mean Google wasn't hard at work trying to make the world a better place.  On the contrary, they had their nose to the grindstone and were working on a ton of new changes that effect web spam.  For instance, hacked sites were a huge problem in 2010.  Hackers were taking control of other websites and adding their own links to them, or distributing malware, or worse.  Google put many many changes in place which effected this directly and worked diligently to try to find solutions to this problem.

Another major thing search engine optimizers were talking about was the changes to Google's algorithm that effected poor quality content and link farms.  Google did a great job recognizing that the internet was becoming more and more cluttered with rewritten spammy content from very few relevant sources.  Google is working hard to make 2011 a worse year for this type of spam.  (This will need to be a separate blog post!)

4. You only need good incoming links for search engine optimization.

I'd like to meet the people who came up with this search engine optimization lie.  Its really quite funny - if all you needed was a ton of incoming links, why do you even write content on your website?  Haven't you heard of crawlability, content, keyword latent indexing, site architecture, good internal linking practice, and relevant content? (Did you notice I said the word, "content 3 times? HINT HINT!)

5. The keywords meta tag plays a factor with Google and other search engines.

No, you fool, it doesn't, and it hasn't for some time.  I can't tell you how many people still feel that this is a needed tag on their website.  Look at my website - do you see a keyword tag anywhere on the website?

I think not.

2011 is likely to bring some exciting changes for us search engine optimizers who are willing to put in the work, patience, and skill required to optimize websites properly.  Its going to be more important to compete with extremely high quality content, high quality incoming links, and other areas of expertise that brings in the real, long, and lasting SEO results.