Cliches in the SEO World

Posted by randfish

Alright, this one's just for fun. We were batting around some cliches in the industry (at conferences, on blog posts, in forums) and thought that a few were worth sharing.

• Black Hats are British
  More specifically, it seems they all have some relationship to Leeds (born there, live there, from "around there"). Maybe there's something in the water.
• "Content is King"
  Ugghh... I imagine that most people who've spent 10 minutes in the SEO field are probably sick of hearing this, even if it's true.
• "I'm 100% White Hat"
  Sure, I buy links, spam the ocassional blog, send out cheesy link requests and hide white on white text at the bottom of the page, but other than that...
• "I'm a Nefarious Black Hat"
  My sites make $10 a month on AdSense (in total), and I'm still trying to get my first site banned, but hey - it sure sounds sexier than "white hat."
• Matt Cutts is a Government Spy
  No. Just no. He's an employee of Google - that's it.
• Matt Cutts Once Said
  Not always valid in my book. If you don't test it yourself or have data to back up your hypothesis, the "Matt Cutts said" or "GoogleGuy said" argument does not serve as the final answer. Same goes for anyone else - just because Dave Naylor or Greg Boser or that insufferable, yellow-shoed Rand guy said or wrote something doesn't make it gospel.
• MSN/Yahoo!/Google/Ask Sucks
  They usually "suck" because they're not sending you traffic and then, when you finally get things right on your site, they suddenly "rule."
• My Site's Been Banned/Penalized
  9/10 times, your site has not been banned or penalized, you're just not getting the links you need to compete and the engines are getting smarter about which ones they count.
• I Hate Web 2.0
  You probably hate it because it's poorly defined and frustratingly over-applied, not because you actually don't like UGC, RSS feeds, AJAX or shiny, clean web design.
• Google Reps and PageRank
  In public, Googlers seem to have an obsession with using PageRank when they really mean "advanced link quality/quantity score that has very little relationship to the original algo." You'll hear them say that results go into the supplementary index because of low PageRank (of course, there's plenty of high PR pages in there that just happen to be duplicate/low quality content) or that PageRank is how they determine which source is canonical between different versions of content (I just don't believe they would be naive enough to avoid using other metrics, too).
• I've Been Thinking of Going White Hat
  One of your big sites got banned and suddenly you're thinking that hard work and unique content and hours of labor are more attractive than 3 hours at the computer every night on your $1K-per-day churn and burns... Why am I skeptical?

From: SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog