Every so often it is good to address this topic again as a refresher. All of these statements are backed with testing results.

1. Google gives more weight to the “body” of the document more than they do the top, left, right and bottom navigation areas. TRUE. This is especially true with links. Placing links in the body of the document cause massive upswings compared to links in the navigational areas on the same page. This was also confirmed in Vegas by an engineer. It seems it is one of the gauges they use to detect duplicate content.

2. Having non-compliant (W3C) code on your site will increase your rankings. FALSE. This was a “link bait” article that was debunked by us last year. It is total garbage.

3. On the flip-side, having compliant (W3C) code on your site will increase your rankings. FALSE. While a couple of years ago I noticed trends of increased spidering and ranking per compliant code, that has ceased. Instead, the search engines are looking for “bot compliant” code, which you can test with Leslie Rohde’s OptiSpider, which is a program I am completely hooked on.

4. Using a hyphenated domain name will harm your rankings. FALSE. What usually happens is spammers use hyphenated domains due to their push a few years ago, and thus they will practice “spamming tactics” which causes a drop in the SERPs not the hyphens in the domain.

5. Buying links will get your site banned or penalized. FALSE. Buying the wrong links can do that, but link buying in general is standard advertising practice. My advice is to deal directly with the webmaster as too many link brokers are selling “Fake PageRank” links.

6. Using Google Sitemaps will get your site banned or penalized. FALSE. If this were true, there would be a lot more articles about this.

7. Google uses human editors to change the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). FALSE. Google’s index is too massive and searches in the trillions. There is a human factor and that is filtering out Spam that the filters let through. Google has an office in India where they are doing just that.

8. Using a Dedicated IP increasing ranking. FALSE. Unless, of course, you are sharing an IP with a known spammer and you risk getting nailed by the penalty they suffer. Mostly, having a dedicated IP is for business protection as previously discussed in other articles.

9. Pages in the Supplemental Results indicates a serious problem with the site. FALSE. Google has pages in the Supplemental Index. I have pages in the Supplemental Index. Being in the Supplemental Index is usually caused by:

a) lack of links to the page
b) no internal link pointing to the page
c) indexing error when fetching the page
d) dynamically generated content
e) site is untrusted

10. PageRank isn’t important. FALSE. The main issue here is too many people just don’t understand PageRank. While pages with no PageRank appear in the top ten of the SERPs, that doesn’t diminish the value of PageRank.