Myths and misconceptions in the field of Search Engine Optimization are ideas that most people assume to be true, but really are not.
There are far too many SEOs out there spouting their mouths off, blindly repeating the latest gossip, about stuff that they obviously know nothing about. Not only does Leak Juice sound sleazy, it really doesn’t have anything to do with white-hat natural organic search engine optimization.
Amazon.com has 1.8+ million webpages each of which is automatically generated every time a new product is added. The only interesting, or fully developed, webpages to be found on Amazon.com are those for the same popular items being offered by off-line retailers. The long tail marketing tactics of Amazon.com apply only to their obscure hard to get items, most of whose corresponding webpages are quite undeveloped and empty. To try to apply the same long tail webpage development concept to the average site that contains only hand written content is an absurdity that perpetuates a fallacy of unreasonable expectations on the part of naive website operators.
Search engine optimization is about optimizing what one has control over. Webmasters in most cases have no control over who links to them. In fact, obtaining links from other websites is about website promotion rather than SEO. Wasting time on trying to get external links by engaging in superstitious behavior is counter productive to good search engine optimization.
SEOs that make a W3C Validation claim are just trolls trying to scam you into spending your time making worthless busywork changes to your website. Or, worst yet trying to scam you into purchasing their expensive SEO services.
The supreme importance of PageRank simply is not so. Only when all other things are equal does the importance of pagerank ever come into play.