SEO Myths to Avoid When Launching Your Marketplace Website

Hello friends! This time we will talk about common SEO myths and why you should stop following them.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the optimization of a website to improve its position on the results by search engines, but this algorithm change every year, and in the latest years it has evolved a lot. This just has created tons of myths and websites where you will find whatever they offer to improve your SEO, maximize your site's traffic, put your website on top of every search engine, and all the stuff they tell you for an amount of money per month, all of these are lies.

So, here we listed some SEO myths

HTTPS doesn't matter in SEO

You've probably already noticed that there are pages that start with an HTTP and other ones that start with HTTPS, the one with the S indicates that the website is encrypted, which means a safe site.

Well, a few years ago Google mentioned that their algorithms consider an HTTPS website as a good sign site for ranking and positioning.

Of course, if your website has HTTP it will be ranking too, but, e.g. Google Chrome users will see a tag before your site's URL that indicates "Not Secure" website, and there you will be affected, not by SEO but by this "Not Secure" label, people don't like to browse in that websites.

Google Affiliations Help

No, they don't help, because they do not worth it. You will be surprised to know a large number of SEO websites and agencies that claim to be partners with Google and improve your SEO every day to get you on top. But, think about it, such enterprise as Google will share their algorithms and information to the public? of course not, so, don't fall with these “Google partner agencies” and waste your time.

You will probably find websites that indicate some possible future SEO factors, but these results are not guaranteed.

Penalties For Duplicated Content

At this part, we can talk about two things, duplicated content inside your website and duplicated content from other websites (replica from another site).

Of course, we want to make sure you know that it is not so easy for search engines to punish a website by eliminating it from indexes results. It only happens when there's a bad practice to “cheat” the search results. Penalized websites are common those that make cloaking and spam.

Well, when it is about duplicate content on your site, search engines don't penalize you, because if your content is great, they will want to show it to users.

On the other hand, if you copy content from another website, search engines identify it quickly and you could be penalized, they insist that your content must be and has to be original.

Having Domain Keywords Is Perfect For Ranking

This may be the most discussed topic in the history of SEO, you will find a large number of websites, blogs, and experts that are still discussing this. It helps, but not the way you are thinking.

Of course, some years ago, having a keyword in your domain was the perfect game to get you to the top of the search engines, but this has changed because as we mentioned earlier, it is something that has to do with great content inside your website.

We recommend you to strive to create high-quality content for users instead of thinking for months about what will be your domain keyword, search engines always will offer the best solution for what users are looking for.

Hide Text on Pages Works

Some people hide the text by making the color of the font the same as the background, others use a very small font size that we can not see on the website, and this is known as Cloaking, before, we told you that this can be penalized by search engines.

With this BAD practice it is possible to place your website on tops with terms that are not relevant or have to do with your page, but, nowadays search engines read pages by pretending to be a real user (like a human), and they find this “tricks”, what happens next, well, you will be penalized.

So, this is something we recommend not to do. You will end with a lot of issues with ranking.

Social Media Helps Positioning

In some way it does, let us explain it better, you have to use social media as a tool, because it is a tool to improve users experience with your website, and it is useful to collect information from that experience, but it doesn't help to rank on top of search engines.

What can help you get to the top are the links and tweets that people make about your site, this way search engines will index your content, e.g. if some of your content is being shared by a lot of people, search engines will take it as relevant content and they will put it on the top.

SEO is Dying or Actually It Is Dead

You have to know that SEO is not dead, and it is so far from being dead, every day it evolved and changes its algorithms, this is why there isn't a formula or steps you can follow to always stay on top, the only thing you can do, it is to create great and original content besides creating it continuously.

Now, you probably be thinking about Meta Descriptions and you should know that search engines take part in this and they decide what to show depending on your content.

Remember it is always about the content you have created on your website that matters in SEO.

What changed in SEO since 2022, and the myths that matter for marketplaces

Google has changed a lot since this post was written. On March 5, 2024 it announced a core update. When the rollout finished, Google said it had cut low-quality, unoriginal content in results by 45% (update dated April 26, 2024). The same update added three spam policies: scaled content abuse (many pages made to rank, "whether automation, humans or a combination are involved"), site reputation abuse (enforced from May 5, 2024) and expired domain abuse. Google's own documentation now settles several old myths directly:

HTTPS matters more than ever. In an October 28, 2025 post, Google said Chrome 154 (October 2026) turns on "Always Use Secure Connections" for all users, so visitors get a warning before a public HTTP site opens. Google also said that, counting public sites only, HTTPS use in Chrome on Windows already reaches 98%.

A checklist for classifieds and marketplace sites

• Keep user listings from becoming spam. User-generated spam is one of Google's spam policies. Google's abuse prevention guide (updated Dec 10, 2025) recommends CAPTCHAs on submission forms, moderating suspicious posts, ugc or nofollow on links in untrusted content, and noindex on posts from new users until they build a reputation.
• Don't let filters create endless URLs. Price, location and category filters can create huge numbers of pages. Google's faceted navigation guide (updated Dec 18, 2025) suggests blocking filter URLs in robots.txt if you don't need them indexed, keeping parameter order consistent, and returning a 404 when a filter combination has no results.
• Don't mass-produce empty pages. Thousands of thin city-and-category pages with no listings are the pattern the scaled content abuse policy targets. Publish a page once it has real ads behind it.
• Watch speed on mobile. Interaction to Next Paint replaced First Input Delay as a Core Web Vital on March 12, 2024. Google's targets are LCP within 2.5 s, INP under 200 ms and CLS under 0.1. Photo-heavy listing pages usually fail LCP first, so compress your images.

Of course, if you are using YCLAS you don't have to worry about anything, we do all the SEO work for you, if you want to know how to do it, and our recommendations in SEO with Yclas, Click Here

Regards,
YCLAS team.