Last updated on April 13th, 2015 at 01:43 pm

I thought it was time that I told you about some of the bad SEO advice that is out there.  This was prompted by two things that have happened recently, the first was an SEO seminar that I went to where the speaker said that every site needed an xml site map and that this file was a way to tell Google and the other search engines that you don’t want them to visit a page.

There are two things wrong with this statement – the first is that the only sites that really need a site map are those where the navigation is difficult for the engines to get around the site (or a section of the site).  If you take a site that has maybe 10 pages and every page has navigation (either visible or at the very least in the code on the page) then there is absolutely no need for an xml site map.

The second problem with the statement is that an xml sitemap (whether it’s called sitemap.xml or anything else) is only a way to list pages on the site.  There is no way to say in the file that you don’t want a page read – this is done in one of two ways normally, either by adding specific code to a file called robots.txt, something like :

User-agent: *
Disallow: /page.html

The danger of doing this is that you are advertising that the page exists to anyone (human or bot) that reads the page which is something that you might not want to do if the page is “hidden” from the navigation.

The other common method is by using a meta tag on the code behind the page that says something like <meta name=”robots” content=”noindex” />. Of course, if the page is meant to be hidden then there are othr technical ways to hide the page from all visitors unless they either have a password to access the page or are on a list of “approved” IP addresses (in simple terms, an IP address is a number that identifies your connection to the internet).

You can read more about the robots.txt file here and xml, and other forms of,  sitemaps here if you are interested.

The second thing that happened is that I have had several emails in the past couple of days from so-called SEO experts based in India (nothing unusal there and I imagine that almost every reader will have the same problem).  What is unusual is that the emails have warned me about the most recent Google update – sadly no the recent Panda 4.0 update that happened a week ago but an update called Starfish that is supposed to have turned the SEO world on it’s head.  It seems that our site is not compliant with this recent update and unless I get these experts to work on the site it will start to drop in it’s rankings in Google.  Now then… what these experts fail to spot is that this was supposedly relating to ecommerce sites and that it was first announced on the 1st April 2014 by hubspot – you can see the article here.  Note the date and the confirmation that it was indeed an April fools spoof.

These are just two examples of bad SEO advice, there is plenty of other bad advice out there as many SEO professionals with any length of experience will confirm.  My advice, which it something I always say when I give a talk about SEO, is to check what ever you are told or read about SEO.  I appreciate that this means that you are having to so some research of your own and if you are paying someone to work on optimising your site this could go against the grain but if you think that bad optimisation could result in not getting good results or even getting your site banned in Google (as has happened to one firm that contacted me for help) then I’m sure you’ll agree that carrying out some checks of your own is worthwhile.