There is significant disagreement on the phylogenetic relationships at the root of the animal tree of life. While initial analyses of genomic-scale datasets associated with the publication of the first two, completely sequenced, comb jellies (phylum Ctenophora) genomes (Ryan et al. 2013; Moroz et al. 2014; and Whelan et al. 2015) suggested that this lineage might represent the sister group of all the other animals, further re-analyses of the datasets associated with these studies (Pisani et al. 2015) showed that a position of the ctenophores at the root of the animal tree is most likely a tree reconstruction artifact. The results of Pisani and collaborators sparked a heated debate (e.g. Halanych et al. 2016 Vs Pisani et al. 2016) with Halanych et al. (2016) suggesting that, contrary to Pisani et al. (2015), the placement of the sponges at the root of the animal tree might represent a compositional attraction between Silicean sponges and the outgroups. Here, we will present results of reanalyses of all recently published datasets (Ryan et al. 2013; Whelan et al. 2015; Chang et al. 2015; Cannon et al. 2016) that bears on this problem and show that contrary to Halanych et al. (2016) correcting for compositional heterogeneity invariably strenghten support for sponges as the sister group of all the other animals. This strongly confirms the results of Pisani et al. (2015). We shall use these results to illustrate how, phylogenetic patterns are best extracted and distinguished from non-phylogenetic noise in the analyses of genomic scale datasets.