Top 50 Google Ranking Factors 2016:Follow these suggestions, and watch your website rise the
ranks to the top of search-engine results.
1. Domain Age: In this video, Matt Cutts states that:
“The difference between a domain that’s six
months old versus one year old is really not that big at all.”.
In other
words, they do use
domain age…but it’s not very important.
2. Keyword Appears in Top Level Domain: Doesn’t give
the boost that it used to, but having your keyword in the domain still acts as
a relevancy signal. After all, they still bold keywords that appear in a domain
name.
3. Keyword As First Word in Domain: A domain that starts with their target keyword has an
edge over sites that either don’t have the keyword in their domain or have the
keyword in the middle or end of their domain.
4. Domain registration length: A Google patent states:
“Valuable (legitimate) domains are often paid
for several years in advance, while doorway (illegitimate) domains rarely are
used for more than a year. Therefore, the date when a domain expires in the
future can be used as a factor in predicting the legitimacy of a domain”.
5. Keyword in Subdomain Name: Moz’s 2011 panel agreed that a keyword appearing in
the subdomain can boost rankings:
6. Domain History: A
site with volatile ownership (via whois) or several drops may tell Google to
“reset” the site’s history, negating links pointing to the domain.
7. Exact Match Domain: EMDs may still give you an edge…if it’s a quality
site. But if the EMD happens to be a low-quality site, it’s vulnerable to the EMD
update:
8. Public vs. Private WhoIs: Private WhoIs information may be a sign of “something
to hide”. Matt Cutts is quoted as stating at Pubcon 2006:
“…When I checked the whois on them, they all
had “whois privacy protection service” on them. That’s relatively
unusual. …Having whois privacy turned on isn’t automatically bad, but
once you get several of these factors all together, you’re often talking about
a very different type of webmaster than the fellow who just has a single site
or so.”
9. Penalized WhoIs Owner: If Google identifies a particular person as a spammer
it makes sense that they would scrutinize other sites owned by that person.
10. Country TLD extension: Having a Country Code Top Level Domain (.cn, .pt, .ca)
helps the site rank for that particular country…but limits the site’s ability
to rank globally.
Page-Level Factors
11. Keyword in Title Tag: The title tag is a webpage’s second most important
piece of content (besides the content of the page) and therefore sends a strong on-page
SEO signal.
12. Title Tag Starts with Keyword: According to Moz data, title tags that starts
with a keyword tend to perform better than title tags with the keyword towards
the end of the tag:
13. Keyword in Description Tag: Another relevancy signal. Not especially important
now, but still makes a difference.
14. Keyword Appears in H1 Tag: H1 tags are a “second title tag” that sends another
relevancy signal to Google, according to results from this correlation
study:
15. Keyword is Most Frequently Used Phrase in Document:Having a
keyword appear more than any other likely acts as a relevancy signal.
16. Content Length: Content with more words can cover a wider breadth and
are likely preferred to shorter superficial articles. SERPIQ found that content
length correlated with SERP position:
17. Keyword Density:
Although not as important as it once was, keyword density is still something
Google uses to determine the topic of a webpage. But going overboard can hurt
you.
18. Latent Semantic Indexing Keywords in Content (LSI): LSI keywords help search
engines extract meaning from words with more than one meaning (Apple the
computer company vs. the fruit). The presence/absence of LSI probably also acts
as a content quality signal.
19. LSI Keywords in Title and Description Tags: As with
webpage content, LSI keywords in page meta tags probably help Google discern
between synonyms. May also act as a relevancy signal.
20. Page Loading Speed via HTML: Both Google and Bing use
page loading speed as a ranking factor. Search engine spiders can estimate your
site speed fairly accurately based on a page’s code and filesize.
21. Duplicate Content: Identical content on the same site (even slightly
modified) can negatively influence a site’s search engine visibility.
22. Rel=Canonical: When used properly, use of this tag may prevent
Google from considering pages duplicate content.
23. Page Loading Speed via Chrome: Google may also use Chrome user data to get a better
handle on a page’s loading time as this takes into account server speed, CDN
usage and other non HTML-related site speed signals.
24. Image Optimization: Images on-page send search engines important relevancy
signals through their file name, alt text, title, description and caption.
25. Recency of Content Updates: Google
Caffeine update favors recently updated content, especially for
time-sensitive searches. Highlighting this factor’s importance, Google shows
the date of a page’s last update for certain pages:
26. Magnitude of Content Updates: The significance of edits and changes is also a
freshness factor. Adding or removing entire sections is a more significant
update than switching around the order of a few words.
27. Historical Updates Page Updates: How often has the page been updated over time?
Daily, weekly, every 5-years? Frequency of page updates also play a role in
freshness.
28. Keyword Prominence: Having a keyword appear in the first 100-words of a
page’s content appears to be a significant relevancy signal.
29. Keyword in H2, H3 Tags: Having your keyword appear as a subheading in H2 or
H3 format may be another weak relevancy signal. Moz’s panel agrees:
30. Keyword Word Order: An exact match of a searcher’s keyword in a page’s
content will generally rank better than the same keyword phrase in a different
order. For example: consider a search for: “cat shaving techniques”. A page
optimized for the phrase “cat shaving techniques” will rank better than a page
optimized for “techniques for shaving a cat”. This is a good illustration of
why keyword research is really, reallyimportant.
31. Outbound Link Quality: Many SEOs think that linking out to authority sites
helps send trust signals to Google.
32. Outbound Link Theme: According to Moz, search engines may use the content
of the pages you link to as a relevancy signal. For example, if you have a page
about cars that links to movie-related pages, this may tell Google that your
page is about the movie Cars, not the automobile.
33. Grammar and Spelling: Proper grammar and spelling is a quality signal,
although Cutts gave mixed messages in 2011 on whether or not this was
important.
34. Syndicated Content: Is the content on the page original? If it’s scraped
or copied from an indexed page it won’t rank as well as the original or end up
in their Supplemental Index.
35. Helpful Supplementary Content: According to a now-public Google Rater
Guidelines Document, helpful supplementary content is an indicator of a page’s
quality (and therefore, Google ranking). Examples include currency converters,
loan interest calculators and interactive recipes.
36. Number of Outbound Links: Too many dofollow OBLs may “leak” PageRank,
which can hurt that page’s rankings.
37. Multimedia: Images,
videos and other multimedia elements may act as a content quality signal.
38. Number of Internal Links Pointing to Page: The number of
internal links to a page indicates its importance relative to other pages on
the site.
39. Quality of Internal Links Pointing to Page: Internal
links from authoritative pages on domain have a stronger effect than pages with
no or low PR.
40. Broken Links: Having too many broken links on a page may be a sign
of a neglected or abandoned site. The Google Rater Guidelines Document uses
broken links as one was to assess a homepage’s quality.
41. Reading Level: There’s no doubt that Google estimates the reading
level of webpages. In fact, Google used to give you reading level stats:
But what they
do with that information is up for debate. Some say that a basic reading level
will help you rank better because it will appeal to the masses. But others
associate a basic reading level with content mills like Ezine Articles.
42. Affiliate Links:
Affiliate links themselves probably won’t hurt your rankings. But if you have
too many, Google’s algorithm may pay closer attention to other quality signals
to make sure you’re not a “thin affiliate site”.
43. HTML errors/W3C validation: Lots of HTML errors or sloppy coding may be a sign
of a poor quality site. While controversial, many in SEO think that WC3
validation is a weak quality signal.
44. Page Host’s Domain Authority: All things being equal, a page on an authoritative
domain will rank higher than a page on a domain with less authority.
45. Page’s PageRank: Not perfectly correlated. But in general higher
PR pages tend to rank better than low PR pages.
46. URL Length: Search
Engine Journal notes that excessively long URLs may hurt search
visibility.
47. URL Path: A
page closer to the homepage may get a slight authority boost.
48. Human Editors: Although never confirmed, Google has filed a
patent for a system that allows human editors to influence the SERPs.
49. Page Category: The
category the page appears on is a relevancy signal. A page that’s part of a
closely related category should get a relevancy boost compared to a page that’s
filed under an unrelated or less related category.
50. WordPress Tags: Tags are WordPress-specific relevancy signal.
According to Yoast.com
Post a Comment