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“25 SEO Lies Web Devs Keep Repeating That Make SEOs Want to Cry – PodCast Checklist
Posted by on April 23, 2026 at 2:11 amSorry for the clickbait-y vibe — but if you're a Tech SEO who's tired of the same recycled garbage flooding Reddit, LinkedIn, X, and "expert" blogs, buckle up. I'm prepping for a podcast tomorrow and wanted to crowdsource the dumbest, most persistent web dev + technical SEO myths that refuse to die. These aren't harmless opinions — they're actively wasting your time, budget, and crawl efficiency. Here are the biggest offenders I keep seeing repeated like gospel:
- You can "optimize" crawl budget like it's a dial you control
- More crawling = automatically better SEO outcomes
- Your tech stack determines your SEO success (Next.js vs. WordPress wars, anyone?)
- Google "hates" thin content and will punish you instantly
- Core Web Vital is make-or-break for rankings
- Crawl budgets are a real, tangible thing every site needs to obsess over
- Great SEO = just fixing every red flag in your technical audit
- XML sitemaps are vital — Google needs them to index your pages
- Thin content is inherently bad and toxic to your site
- Adding more internal links magically helps Google "understand" your site better
- LLMS.txt
- Robots.txt = an optimization hack
These myths sound plausible. They get repeated in audits, agency proposals, and LinkedIn hot takes.
But they are outdated, oversimplified, or straight-up misleading in 2026. They deserve a justified funeral.
What am I missing? Drop the most infuriating technical SEO or web dev myth you've seen lately in the comments — especially the ones that still get parroted by senior devs, SEOs, or tools that should know better. The spiciest (and most evidence-based) replies might even make it on the podcast.
Let's burn some sacred cows.
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1 Reply
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EEAT
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Lots of myths here, some i hear and practice a lot. Do you have any explanation to debunk them or can point to Google guidelines? Just curious.
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Dwell time and bounce rate are 2 of my favorites
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Interesting framing. All the most extreme versions of statements.
Like, no optimizing a crawl budget isn’t a dial you can control. But to the degree you can work with engineering teams to find areas where your crawl budget is being wasted (product variants, refinements, etc) and you can stop that from happening, you fucking should. And if you’re not looking at crawl logs at all, you’re actively fucking up.
No, more crawling doesn’t automatically mean better SEO outcomes. Who the hell is saying this? But at the same time, you DO need your shit crawled. And if you have a site that changes its content frequently, regular crawling can be impactful, particularly if time and timing is tight.
No, your tech stack by itself doesn’t determine your SEO success. But if something in your tech stack is fucking up the ability for your site to be rendered to crawlers, or is fucking up your schema, or is fucking up your data pipeline to your data warehouse so that you don’t have analyitcs you can trust to make good decisions…well your tech stack may be harming your ability to succeed organically.
I could go on and on for each of these bullet points. The issue isn’t your bullet points; it’s that they are the most extreme versions of each of these things (with the exception of llms.txt because lol llms.txt). Most of these things have value to a certain degree. Most of these are things that can be improved to make your data better or your customer experience better or your funnel more effective. Other things not on this list will have more impact on organic traffic assuming you aren’t noindexing your website. But if you fix your framing so that it isn’t completely insane, nothing outside of the llms.txt bullet actually lack value if they can receive iterative improvements. I’ve seen some disasters that were caused by problems that were reflected in most of these bullet points at one time or another.
$0.02
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Great initiative to debunk those persistent technical SEO myths for your podcast. Many still believe that a perfect Lighthouse score directly translates to higher rankings, rather than being one signal among many. Also, the idea that disavowing links for every minor spammy link is always necessary, when Google often handles those automatically. Will you also cover the nuances of how these myths used to be partially true, before Google’s algorithms evolved?
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Instead of attacking many of the legitimate points, you can and should just consolidate all the points to: All these things are important, but their importance is inflated, and often misses the parts that determine why or how they are important.
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“Fixing technical SEO issues will move rankings” is the one I keep seeing abused.
In a lot of audits I’ve run, you can clear 80% of “errors” and see zero movement because none of them were actually bottlenecks. Meanwhile a single internal linking or intent mismatch fix does more than the whole checklist.
Feels like people confuse “can be improved” with “is limiting growth.”
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Finally, someone said it, most of these “SEO rules” are just outdated shortcuts dressed up as strategy. Real SEO in 2026 is about intent, quality signals, and how search systems interpret value, not blindly fixing audits or chasing crawl myths.
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