SEO is the core of digital marketing to unleash your business growth organically in SERPs, and everyone these days is using SEO to uplift business growth.

Google also keeps updating algorithms to control deceptive techniques and praise legit ones. Sometimes people don’t understand the whole picture and create some hypothetical concepts. They just don’t self-use these ineffective concepts but spread them to others.

So, if you’re employing SEO for your digital business, then you should know about these myths so that you won’t be misguided.

Let’s discuss SEO myths that you must avoid in 2020.

XML Sitemap Improves Your Ranking

XML sitemaps are used to help Google’s bots to crawl a site. Sometimes due to uneven interlinking, Google spiders can’t reach some of your website pages, and sitemap has all pages of your website, which is convenient to crawl and index. So, XML sitemap can also help you crawl and index your new updated pages.

According to Google Webmasters Central Blog, XML sitemaps have no direct impact on your rankings. It just let crawlers know about significant pages of your website and index them asap depending on your crawling frequency. So, break this myth and don’t expect a sitemap to increase your website rankings.

High Keyword Density Impacts Your Organic Rankings

Keywords are used by search engines to measure your relevance to a particular query. So, keywords decide your rank in SERP, but there is a famous myth that high keyword density decreases your ranks.

According to John Mueller of Google, search engines don’t focus on keyword density. If your content is passing value to the user, then you are eligible for top rankings independent of the number of keywords.

Google has developed enough intelligence and algorithms to detect and punish mischief. So, focus on quality & relevancy instead of keyword density. Although the variation of keywords can help you cover more audience and magnify your visibility in more easy way.

Secure Website isn’t Crucial

Security has the utmost importance these days because hackers and cyber intruders are always ready to target one’s vulnerabilities and breach security. If you don’t consider safety, then your confidential data is open to hackers, and they can also steal the user’s info, which is undesirable and spoils your credibility.

Your online transactions are also prone to hackers if you don’t secure your website. Your website should have HTTPS, which is secured by an SSL certificate protecting your data. Google also gives higher importance to services with top-notch security.

So, you must consider a secure website to get rankings and deter cyber attacks.

Google Penalty for Duplicate Content

Google penalizes websites that use deceptive techniques to manipulate search engine results. Earlier it was easy to misguide search engines, but now Google is smart enough to target nefarious activities and penalize them instantly. Officially there is no website penalty for duplicity.

If you follow the webmaster guidelines and update your website according to the latest algorithms, then you are safe. Anything you are implementing for a search engine instead of a user, and then you are on the wrong track. There is no filter for duplicate content, but your website is devalued because the search engine gets confused while assigning ranks your content for a query.

So, Google can’t decide superiority between multiple copies and, in the end, diminishes your value. Hence, there is no penalty for duplicate content but adversely impacts your rankings in search results.

These are prevalent myths that you shouldn’t consider while forging your 2020 SEO strategy. Get this new resolution to break myths. Don’t listen to random sources and research properly before implementing something on your website.