Every day I read SEO forums which are full of so-called SEO experts, Now, I am not here to name and shame, I am just curious as to why people give other newbie SEO misleading information.

One example was when a business owner asked for information on why he had paid £3000 for a site to be created and some SEO, and why he wasn't even indexed by Google. So before I could even click the reply button, 5 people had gotten back to him with their generic copy and paste text which sticks out like a sore form when you see on every new line is <br>. it makes me laugh that they don't spend the time to even clean up their robot-like spam. So I gave him advice, saying that he had no meta data , image alt tags , content, etc, and soon after I had posted this I got a warning from a moderator on the forum.

His response to my post was that I should not give misleading information to someone. I thought to myself, "If he hasn't gotten the bread and butter of SEO, he isn't going to stand a chance," but I left the forum and thought that's the last time I'll log in there.

My next encounter with a deluded SEO expert was when I asked on a forum if anyone had any views on link buidling, and before I knew it I got numerous lines of <br> Comment </Br> telling me that I should contact them for some free advice, that I didn't know what I was talking about, and that link building is necessary any more.

I just keep seeing the same problem: people are giving the wrong information to other people. Why can't we remember the basics of SEO? The way I  see it is that Google wants relevancy and popularity, and those can be split into two things:

Relevancy:

• Content
• Meta Data 
• Keywords
• Images
• Videos

Popularity:

• Links

So why are people saying that all the above is not necessary?