Google Ranking Factors

 On-Page (Keyword-Specific) Ranking Factors:

  • Andy Beal – Keyword use in external link anchor text is one of the top SEO factors overall. I’ve seen sites rank for competitive keywords—without even mentioning the keyword on-page—simply because of external link text.

  • Andy Beard – Keyword Use in the Meta Keywords Tag – ignore them unless using a blogging platform which can use the same keywords as tags. Google ignores them.

  • Christine Churchill – Taking the time to create a good title tag has the biggest payoff of any on-page criteria. Just do it!

  • Duncan Morris – It’s worth pointing out that even though having keywords in the meta description doesn’t impact rankings they can play a significant role in the sites click through rate from the SERPs.

  • Peter Wailes – Domain name keyword usage gains most of its strength through what anchor text people are then likely to link to you with, not so much from inherent value, which is lower in my opinion.

On-Page (Non-Keyword) Ranking Factors:

  • Russell Jones – If Google only ranked the “tried and true”, their results would be old and outdated. Recency is a valuable asset when links are hard to come by.

  • Tom Critchlow – Factors like recency (freshness) and content changes are difficult factors to pin down. A fresh page is a real asset if trying to rank for fresh queries and when QDF hits in but other times having an established page can be more of a benefit so sometimes you need one and sometimes you need the other.

  • Peter Meyers – Anecdotally, it feels like freshness is more important than ever. I’m amazed how often a blog post ranks within the first day, holding a top-10 position before finally settling a few spots (or even pages) lower.

  • Carlos Del Rio – HTML Validation is not necessary, but running validation is an easy way to catch broken code that can trap spiders. If you are not linking out at all you are sending a signal that you are not part of the Internet as a whole. Creating topical association is very important to maintaining a strong position.

  • Ian Lurie – Ratio of code to text and HTML Validation don’t have direct impacts, but by focusing on these factors you create semantically correct markup and fast-loading, content-rich pages, which has a huge impact. The description tag and static/non-static URLs won’t impact rankings. But they do impact click-through on your listing once you see it. So I’m not suggesting you ignore your description tag or use messy URLs. But when you change them, expect more clicks for the rankings you have, not better rankings.

Page-Specific Link Popularity Ranking Factors:

  • Jon Myers – SEO ranking for me is won in the external factors today. It is the old 80%/20% rule and time needs to be invested in the getting your linkage right as this is where you will win. Make sure you are focusing the keyword anchor text and directing to the relevant pages. The focus has to be towards a quality and quantity mix and also don’t get all your links from one type of source, make sure you have a blend as this I believe counts well for you as well.

    Use PR rank to determine high ranking links but make sure they are relevant is always a good starting point to refine the links and clean out the bad ones and refocus the anchor text on the good ones as I tend to find that more often than not about 85% of external links will have brand keywords as anchors, so you could be missing some great opportunities. Never forget though ones the bots are there make sure the internal linkage is good as it counts for a lot!

  • Russell Jones – The Link is King. All Hail the Link.

  • Hamlet Batista – Sub-optimized pages with many incoming links outrank easily their well optimized but poorly linked counterparts.

  • Todd Malicoat – Links are to SEO's what Snowflakes are to Eskimos. Off page factors were the most significant change in search relevancy that lead Google to become the 800 lbs. gorilla that they are. Focus on this area, and understanding the difference between different links and their relationship to search result sets, and you will understand the crux of good SEO. Understand how to place a value on link equity of a site, and you have a very powerful skill in evaluating competition in a search result.

  • Jane Copland – I certainly don’t put much merit in the idea that the number of followed vs. nofollowed links pointing at a page plays a part in Google’s traditional web search results anymore. Think of all the really high-quality social links from sites like Twitter that carry nofollow tags: it would be completely ridiculous to regard a high number of nofollowed links as a detrimental trust metric.


Site-Wide Link-Based Ranking Factors:

  • Carlos Del Rio – There’s likely to be a tipping point with Nofollowed links vs. Followed links to the domain where it’s not a factor unless the tipping point is reached where there are too many Nofollowed links. Then it has a Negative impact.

  • Will Critchlow – Temporal growth of links above and beyond the value of the links themselves tends to only have a positive impact on QDF-type queries in my experience.

  • Aidan Beanland – Google have stated in the past that .edu, .mil and .ac TLD extensions do not inherently pass any more value than others, but that alternative factors may make this seem to be the case.

  • Ann Smarty – Domain strength is a highly important factor (still). We keep seeing pages with 0 strength of their own hosted on reputable domains ranked very high for very competitive words.

  • Lisa D Myers – I do think the distance between trusted domains and you could have an impact, the bots are becoming more intelligent with their reading and will take associations of domains with them as they go to compare to the next site it links to. Using LSI (Latent Symantic Indexing) was just the start for the search engines, I belive the algorithm is now so much more sophisticated and has the power to read not only latent symantic between content on a page but between sites. My mind boggles when I think about the process, it’s a bit like when you were little and tried to imagine the end of the universe! Again it comes down to content, if you generate highly valuable and relevant content the brilliant links will come to you. I know, I know, it’s such a cliche, but unfortunately true. If links are the currency of the web, content is the bank!

Site-Wide (non-link based) Ranking Factors:

  • Adam Audette – Many of these factors aren”t directly related to how Google will score a domain for ranking, BUT these all have a huge factor on the SEO of the site. For that reason it was slightly difficult to pull them out one by one. I believe DMOZ is still very juicy. Hint: Google still uses the directory. Double hint: search for “clothing” sometime and see what 2 of the top 10 results are. That’s significant, especially because there’s no ability to get a link on the ranking category page at DMOZ (which feeds Google’s). Citations/mentions/quality directories are certainly tracked and factored in, along with Google’s domain detective work. XML sitemaps can help with crawl fluidity but aren’t a scoring factor per se.

  • Marshall Simmonds – Search engines either don’t care to, are unable, or aren’t good at organic comprehensive crawls of large sites (those in the millions of pages) due to size and depth of content. This means it’s critical to the success of enterprise level sites to implement XML sitemaps whereas smaller sites may not see the benefit as much.

  • Wil Reynolds – Alexa and compete rankings would be of very little value given the prevalence of Google analytics and the Google toolbar. They can get much more accurate data from their own properties.

  • Richard Baxter – Recent changes to Domain Registration Ownership, especially if the domain has been allowed to expire, impact the results extremely negatively.

  • Ian Lurie – Use of Adsense/Google Apps/Google Search or other search engine-owned tools, though, won’t impact results at all. If your site is so hurting, SEO-wise, that you have to point an Adwords ad at it to get crawled, you’ve got bigger problems.

Social Media/Social Graph Based Ranking Factors:

  • Marty Weintraub – Twitter data isn’t a factor yet, but it’s probably coming.

  • Hamlet Batista – Matt Cutts explained in a video that Google doesn’t care how many twitter followers you have. Their algorithms only care about the links.

  • Dan Thies – Put me down for “no way, never” on all these.

  • Todd Malicoat – Social bookmarking is a quality indicator. Brand mentions are a quality indicator. If I was a search engine engineer, I would likely rank brand mentions based on social media conversations from third parties that were easiest to derive valid data from.

  • Ian McAnerin – I’m inclined to believe that in this case "sometimes a link is just a link", to paraphrase Freud.

Usage Data Ranking Factors:

  • Jessica Bowman – While usability are factors likely in the formula, I haven’t seen much to indicate this is impacting rankings - especially for larger authoritative websites. Companies do need to focus on these because they will likely become a bigger impact in the next year.

  • Andy Beal – While Google may well be experimenting with including these factors in their algorithm, I’ve seen no evidence to support wide-spread usage.

  • Adam Audette – CTR on a search result is a large cumulative factor, and brings in page load time as well, which is something we're very focused on at present.

  • Carlos Del Rio – Brand and domain additives to search terms have become especially important since the Vince change.

  • Ian Lurie – None of these factors have a significant impact YET. But they're coming on. If you think Google’s ignoring all that toolbar data and Searchwiki info, you're mental.

Negative Ranking Factors:

  • Andy Beard –

    Excessive Repetition of the Same Anchor Text in a High Percentage/Quantity of External Links to the Site/Page:

    • It would depend on how they are acquired for long-term benefit
    • If you create a WP theme with Buy Viagra in the footer, don’t expect to be flavor of the month with human reviewers

    Hiding Text with CSS display:none; Styling:

    • Is it part of a navigation system that allows the user to eventually display the content?
    • If you hide a whole bunch of keywords, or keyword stuffed links, it could be a significant factor

    Over-Optimization of Internal Link Anchor Text:

    A perfectly optimized link points to content that is a perfect landing page for the keyword, and Google isn’t going to give you a penalty for something they expect you to do, tell the truth with your links.

    Use of Keyword-Rich Anchor Text Internal Links in Footers:

    • With CSS you could have the header in the footer or the footer in the header
    • does 100+ links in that part of the visible page make sense for users?

    Link Acquisition from Buying Old Domains & Redirecting:

    If redirecting and hosting the old content on the new domain, this can be achieved successfully.

  • Debra Mastaler – A lot of the comments you hear about widgets/301’ing microsites/buying old domains etc affecting you negatively is a result of overblown scare tactics perpetuated by a handful of people. There are a lot of legitimate uses for these tactics and when done well and as part of an overall marketing plan, they are successful.

  • Tom Critchlow – A lot of these factors depend on intent. For example, cloaking by user agent can be fine so long as the intent is pure and many large sites get away with it and have done for years. Also, a fair number of the link factors (such as manipulative bait and switch campaigns) are more likely to have 0 value than negative value. We’ve seen Google preferring to de-value spammy techniques/links rather than apply penalties for them where possible.

  • Carlo Del Rio – I have yet to see a net negative from buying old domains, but it often doesn’t make any positive ranking either. Currently manipulative link acquisition is the biggest threat in causing negative results. Crossing repetitive anchor text and high velocity acquisition is like playing with matches—eventually you get burned.

  • Peter Meyers – It seems like the negative impact of link farms is very niche-specific. In some cases, Google really cracks down (real estate, for example), but in smaller niches I still see people running blatant link farms and getting away with it. I’m not sure the penalty has really made its way into the core algorithm.


Factors Negatively Affecting the Value of an External Link:

  • Adam Audette – All killers. The last one is a grey area...but a major factor. If a link is determined to be paid, it will normally be filtered out from the site's link graph. But there are occasions when a serious penalty will occur from too many paid links.

  • Chris Bennet – I don’t know what measures Google has taken to algorithmically spot low quality paid/rented links but it would be very easy to build a tool that could spot 80-90% of the crap without breaking a sweat.

  • Hamlet Batista – Links from banned sites are pretty much worthless.

  • Todd Malicoat – Most links won’t hurt you, but if you put significant effort into obtaining a link that won’t help you, you’ve negatively impacted your bottom line. Make sure you are hunting for links that matter.

  • Ian McAnerin – Links are not a rankings factor – trust and topic are. Links just represent this. If you can show that the link has little/no trust or is unfocused, then it will not be worth much. If you can show it has neither trust nor accurately indicates the topic, then there is no reason to count it.

Geo-Targeting Factors

  • Joost de Valk – Ranking in different countries has different requirements. For some countries, f.i., Google cannot reliably determine server location based on IP, and some languages are so alike to Google’s algorithm that weird stuff sometimes happens (Dutch pages ranking in German results, f.i.)

  • Russell Jones – Any opportunity you have to tell Google explicitly what region for which your site is designed — do it. Make their job as easy as possible.

  • Wil Reynolds – The address associated with the registration of a domain wouldn’t make sense to have too large of an impact as this would severely hurt sites that are registered in one country yet have content for multiple countries on their site

  • Aidan Beanland – In my experience Google still relies mainly on the ccTLD, IP location of host and Webmaster Tools regional target. Secondary cues are given less importance than in other search engines.

    Language of the site can act as an automatic geo-filter, as only queries in that language would match content from that country. However, this can (and does) cause confusion when the same language is spoken in multiple countries, or the same words are used across multiple languages.

  • Kristjan Mar Haukson – Address Associated with the registration of the domain we have worked with large companies with their address given in one country but targeting another and this has not played any role that we have seen.

 

Helpfull Links