List of sophism. Do you mean syllogisms?

When I started writing my post about SEO sophisms I realised that it was a bit challenging to find actual examples of sophisms.

I searched for "sophism list", "examples of sophism", etc .. but could not find a proper list of examples.

I switched to "my favourites sophisms", and found a page about paradoxes:
http://brainden.com/paradoxes.htm

On this page were listed 3 sophisms, good start..

"A slim crocodile living in the Nile took a child. His mother begged to have him back. The crocodile could not only talk, but was also a great sophist and stated, "If you guess correctly what I will do with him, I will return him. However, if you don't guess his fate, I'll eat him." What statement should the mother make to save her child?"

"Sophist: "Yes, greedy man gives his cash with sorrow. However, he doesn't have the cash with sorrow, so he gives what he doesn't have.""

"What is better than eternal bliss? Nothing. But a slice of bread is better than nothing. So a slice of bread is better than eternal bliss."

I then looked up in google for "A slim crocodile living in the Nile took a child", "Yes, greedy man gives his cash with sorrow.", "What is better than eternal bliss? Nothing", hoping to find other sites listing one of these sophisms alongside others... but not much success, these sophisms were hardly listed anywhere else.

Back to square one. On one hand Google could not find famous sophisms for me, but on the other hand I was convinced that I had been taught at school that the syllogism "Socrates is a man, all men are mortal, hence Socrates is mortal" was a famous one. How come didn't I come across this one in my previous research. I then searched for "hence Socrates is mortal" and found out that it was classified as a "syllogism".

I search then for syllogism to refresh a little bit my memories, and find out that syllogisms was a kind of logical argument used extensively by sophists.

I then searched for "syllogisms quotes", and finally found what I was looking for on http://www.thinkexist.com!

Since I have written the first post (which was more about SEO than sophists really), I started getting about 10 visits a day from people looking for a list of sophisms. These people are probably like me, looking for actual syllogisms, but simply don't use the right search queries.

So instead of directing them to a SEO forum, I thought I could write an other post directing them to the resources they are actually looking for instead. In short, doing a bit of SEO for good :-), and hoping that this post will rank better than the other one.

SEO: top 5 list of sophisms

I recently participated to a thread in an SEO forum, and it struck me how many people in this fields are using sophism to try deceive people in thinking that they are search engines optimisation specialists.

What is sophism?
Sophism can mean two very different things: In the modern definition, a sophism is a confusing or illogical argument used for deceiving someone.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophism

Examples of sophism
"Whatever exists or does not exist exists"
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/richard-sophister/

Have a look at this text from plato: http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/sophist.html
.. very similar to some SEO forums...

Sophism is used to prove something which is either not provable, or which you cannot prove yourself, or in the worst case scenario something which is actually false.

Here is a list of sophisms I came across:
1) Proving that inbound links can hurt you
'"Tries very hard to prevent site A from hurting site B" is a pretty clear indication that it certainly can happen otherwise there would be nothing to "try hard to prevent" now would there.'
Quoted from http://www.webproworld.com/google-discussion-forum/68650-can-inbound-links-really-hurt-you-2.html about whether inbound links can really hurt you or not

2) proving that you should care about keywords density
"There is much talk about the ideal keyword density of a web page. The bottomline here is that there is no thumb rule regarding the ideal keyword density in a website, mainly because the search engines change their algorithms frequently"
http://ezinearticles.com/?Keyword-Density---How-Much-Is-Too-Much?&id=401316

3) proving that you should care about duplicate content
"The solution? Don’t rely on duplicate content as your main method of driving traffic to your site. Should you avoid all duplicate content? Of course not. What kind of duplicate content is acceptable? Answering this question is easily another article in itself."
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/duplicate-content-penalty-how-to-lose-google-ranking-fast/1886/

4) proving that you should not use a dynamic site
"Dynamic Sites are Spidered Slower than Static Sites
Google in particular has made it clear dynamic sites are spidered slower than static sites. The reason for Google to do this are webmaster friendly (as I’ve recently discovered), dynamically generated sites can potentially have unlimited pages and so Google assumes a dynamic looking site (a site with URLs like dynamic-page.php?page=1) is big and slows the crawl speed. It does this to limit server load because if a dynamic site (any site) has millions of pages, Googlebot and the other spiders could cause the server to crash if they spidered too many pages at one time."
http://www.seo-consultant-services.co.uk/static-html-vs-dynamic-urls.html

5) proving that inbound links can damage your site (an other one!)
"While there are links TO your site, the majority of them are nothing more than a list of links to similar vehicle tracking sites - which are not considered to be the ultimate type of links, and in some casesis even considered a scheme or link farm, which Google specificallywarns against in Google's "Quality Guidelines - Basic principles", "Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank ..." - ://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.htmland from Google's explanation of why your site might not be listed, "... certain actions such as ... setting up pages/ links with the sole purpose of fooling search engines may result in permanent removal from our index." - ://www.google.com/webmasters/2.html"


there are many more, but running out of time really.
http://searchengineland.com/070830-074852.php: this is a good list of SEO myths. Pick any of them, go on a SEO forum and check out what so-called specialists have to say about it - doesn't take long before digging out sophism examples -

Useful TIP: forums moderators are usually the most prolific users of sophism. That why SEO myths spread so easily.