Here’s the list of the top 6 SEO myths debunked by Google:

1. Domain Age:

Myth: Most SEO experts agree that the age of your domain makes a big different in your websites ranking. The older it is, the most trust worthy it is, and the higher it will rank.

Fact:  While Google does look at the age of your domain, it makes a very minimal impact in your website’s ranking.

2. Tags Clouds:

Myth: Blogs should use meta tag clouds as much as possible for SEO boosts.

Fact:  I was guilty of this one, I had a big ugly tag cloud on my site that looked horrible.

After some time I removed it because of pure aesthetics, but as it turns out tag clouds have no positive impact on SEO at all and can actually hurt your search rankings if overused.

Really large lists of tag clouds can be confused as “keyword stuffing, especially since tag clouds are a bunch of arbitrary words mixed together.

The risk of dilating your pagerank also increases dramatically when overusing tag clouds.

3. Keyword Meta Tags

Myth: You should add Meta Keywords to all your websites pages to increase the ranking on your website.

Fact: This is something that took dozens of hours of my life when I started.

I keep reading everywhere the importance of good keywords and how adding the right keywords to your meta-tags could help you rank higher in search engines.

But in actuality Google recommends that your spend ZERO time adding keywords to your meta tags!

Google does not even look at them.

Instead you should spend your time in optimizing your title meta tag and your description meta tag since they are used heavily in search queries.

4. Frequent Updates

Myth:  To rank high in Google, you need to post frequent updates to your website.

Fact: When it comes to SEO, updating your content more regularly doesn’t give you any added benefits.

However your human users do benefit from new fresh content, and you should try to update as much as possible but only to keep your readers interested and engaged.

5. Article Marketing

Myth: Article Marketing is a great strategy for building backlinks.

Fact: This one is a tricky one.

While I have used this technique in the past and saw some positive results, it seems that this is no longer a good strategy.

Ever since the new Panda update Google has dropped the authority of many popular article marketing directories.

It seems that article marketing is no longer a good way to build backlinks to your website, especially since most article directories offer poor quality content which Google frowns upon.

Also, this technique can create duplicate content, with the same anchor links pointing back to your site; something that Matt Cutts believes will be detrimental to your SEO efforts.

It’s better to focus on creating valuable easy to read content and using social media marketing to help your content receive natural backlinks.

This links are far more beneficial for ranking high on search engines than the ones you receive from article marketing.

6. Keyword domains

Myth: To rank high your website needs to have a keyword specific domain.

Fact: This is another tricky one.

While it is not necessary to have a keyword specific domain to rank high, in search engines, you do get benefits from having them.

It all depends on what you are trying to do.

For most people having a domain that is brandable, like Twitter, Zinga, and Yahoo is a far more beneficial option.

Even though they do not contain keywords in them.

Conclusion

Sometimes our impatience leads us to take shortcuts and follow the wrong advice.

Those short cuts, or plugins, or “tricks” to rank high on search engines will do nothing more than to waste your valuable time.