Most Controversial Practices That DO NOT (Directly) Affect Your Google Rankings

There’s a lot of controversy over what practices do and do not affect your website’s Google ranking. Does it matter how old your site is? Should you be using H1 or H2 headers? What about your bounce rate?

At the end of the day, a lot of the controversial practice’s business choose to implement simply don’t matter at the end of the day. Here are few of the common myths dispelled, which should be a load off of your shoulders.

New vs Old Sites

Does Google actually impact your rating based on whether you registered back in 2000 or just this year? The quick answer is no. In fact, they couldn’t care less.

What they do care about is how much your content actually helps people find what they’re looking for. If they typed in, “5 Effects of Working Out Daily,” then your content should answer their query while providing relevant links and authority signals. Older sites might stand a better chance of having built themselves up with these types of things over the years, but a new will not be negatively impacted simply because it is new.

Using Google Apps and Services

There’s a notion out there that Google might monitor your Adsense, Analytics, Docs and Gmail to impact your rankings. On the flip side of the coin, others worry that not using their services might as well equate to a blacklist. Neither of these things are true.

Google is not Big Brother from George Orwell’s 1984. They’re not peeking into your email to see if you’ve bought likes or shady links, and they certainly aren’t impacting your ranking one way or another for choosing to use, or not use, their services.

Likes, Tweets and Other Social Media Activity

So, you managed to reach 100,000 page likes and over 1 million shares. That’s awesome, but Google doesn’t care. They don’t even look at that kind of information.

What they do look for is whether or not click through rates generated any brand preference for you in their search results, where links to your site popped up, and how much browser activity you received that might have come from those likes. In this way, social media activity affects your ranking indirectly, but it needs to be genuine activity.

Bounce Rates

A lot of individuals find themselves wrapped up in raw bounce rates and the raw amount of time individuals spend on their site. While it’s true that these could negatively impact your ranking, there’s a major catch.

Google takes pogo-sticking into consideration, which is when people bounce back to the search results then choose a different web page for whatever reason. This doesn’t affect your ranking one bit, because you still helped in their search for the answer they needed.

Now, if they typed in a search then entered your site only to rephrase their question in the search bar, that would be a bad thing. This is where  the SEO tactics of a company come into play. You at least need your content to be relevant to their keywords.

How Much Does Your Host Matter?

Hosting sites can be insanely expensive, but many fear that opting for a cheaper domain provider is a death sentence for their online business. That may or may not be the case, and this is why.

If you host is hurting your load speed or up time, then you’ll see your rankings drop like lead. However, if they can provide the same speeds for a better price, you have absolutely nothing to worry about.

kathayat

Birbahadur Singh Kathayat is an entrepreneur and online marketing consultant. He is founder of the online marketing company LBSWebsoft. He has 15 years of work experience in digital marketing and helping small business. He advises several startups and established companies in India and other countries. You can follow him online at Google+ or @bskathayat.

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