You can feel like a dog chasing its own tail trying to figure out how Google works.

There are thousands of bloggers and journalists spreading volumes of information that simply isn't true. If you followed all the advice about SEO written on blogs, it's unlikely you would receive top listings in Google, and there’s a risk you could damage your site performance and make it difficult to rank at all.

Let me tell you a secret about bloggers…

Articles about the latest SEO updates, techniques or tips are often written by interns, assistants or even ghostwriters. Their job is to write articles. The majority of blog posts about SEO are rarely written by experts or professionals with the day-to-day responsibility of growing site traffic and achieving top rankings in search engines.

Can you learn from someone who doesn't even know how to do it themselves? 

You can't. This is why you have to take the advice spread by blog posts with a grain of salt. 

Don't get me wrong. I love bloggers. There are bloggers out there who practice and blog about SEO and do it well. But it has become increasingly difficult to sort the wheat from the chaff.

Fear not. We will disperse common misconceptions about SEO, show you how to avoid falling into Google's bad books and reveal how to stay up-to-date with how Google ranks sites.

But first, to understand how Google works today, we must understand a little bit about Google's history.