Table of Contents
Top 5 Ranking Factors
Keyword Focused Anchor Text from External Links
73% very high importanceExternal Link Popularity (quantity/quality of external links)
71% very high importanceDiversity of Link Sources (links from many unique root domains)
67% very high importanceKeyword Use Anywhere in the Title Tag
66% very high importanceTrustworthiness of the Domain Based on Link Distance from Trusted Domains (e.g. TrustRank, Domain mozTrust, etc.)
66% very high importance
Top 5 Negative Ranking Factors
Cloaking with Malicious/Manipulative Intent
68% very high importanceLink Acquisition from Known Link Brokers/Sellers
56% high importanceLinks from the Page to Web Spam Sites/Pages
51% moderate importanceCloaking by User Agent
51% moderate importanceFrequent Server Downtime & Site Inaccessibility
51% moderate importanceSee all negative ranking factors
Top 5 Most Contentious Factors
- Cloaking by Cookie Detection 16.3% strong contention
- Cloaking by JavaScript/Rich Media Support Detection 15.4% moderate contention
- Hiding Text with same/similar colored text/background 15.3% moderate contention
- Cloaking by IP Address 15.3% moderate contention
- Cloaking by User Agent 15.2% moderate contention
Note: Consensus and contention percentages are calculated based on the standard deviations of contributor answers.
Participants were asked to apply the ranking factors to Google’s search engine, and although we’ve found that it’s largely applicable to other major US engines (Bing, Yahoo! & Ask), some variance almost certainly exists.
Overall Ranking Algorithm
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- 24% Trust/Authority of the Host Domain
- 22% Link Popularity of the Specific Page
- 20% Anchor Text of External Links
- 15% On-Page Keyword Usage
- 7% Traffic and Click-Through Data
- 6% Social Graph Metrics
- 5% Registration and Hosting Data
Good and brief SEO summary from SEOmoz, with the few things not to ever ignore if you want to optimize your search engine results. It is also a good view on the core of Google’s search algorithm.
SEO experts are the new alchimists, always looking for the philosophical stone (Google’s algorithm) to turn their websites into gold.