Google has declared about 200 ranking factors in their algorithm through which it shows top results on search engine result page. Check out all of them…
DOMAIN LEVEL FACTOR
- Domain Age: Actually a domain that’s six months old as compared to one year old is really not that big or different at all.
- Domain registration length: A lengthy registration time will help in a positive way. It seems your site to be trustworthy for Google crawler.
- Domain History: Google may ‘reset’ site history with giving a negative point to the website having a volatile ownership or having several drops.
- Exact Match Domain: Exact match domain factor is one of the important factor through which it decides quality of website. But it’s vulnerable to the low quality sites but having EMD.
- Keyword in Subdomain Name: Keyword appearing in the subdomain can boost rankings. E.g. keyword.abc.com
- Keyword in Top Level Domain: Your keywords should appear in your main domain as it gives the boost which act as a relevancy signal.
- Keyword as first word in Domain: Targeted keywords should be the first word in you r main domain. It let understand crawler what exactly web page is about.
- Public vs. Private WhoIs: When you get all those factors all together, than you often talk about a different type of webmaster than the person who just has a single website.
- Penalized WhoIs Owner: When particular person is identified as a spammer by Google; it will scrutinize other sites too which are owned by that person.
- Country TLD extension: Website having country code in its top level domain helps to rank site in search results for that particular geographical region but its hard to get ranked that site globally. TLD E.g: .in; .cn; .au; .ca
PAGE LEVEL FACTOR
- Keyword in Title Tag: This factor sends a strong signal to page level optimization signal as Title is second most important piece in content for crawler to index that site.
- Title Tag Starts with Keyword: A Title should start with targeted keyword as it perform better that title tags with keyword included at end.
- Keyword in Description Tag: This is another relevant signal for page level factors as it surely make a difference.
- Keyword Appears in H1 Tag:The H1 tag is the most important heading because it’s the highest level tag that indicates what your page is about.
- Keyword is Most Frequently Used Phrase in Document: Use your targeted keyword most frequently in document. But look after it should not be used too many times in that particular content or phrase.
- Content Length: As it is said “Content is King”. Whenever you are including content it should be broader so that you can include keywords in content.
- Keyword Density: Keyword density factor Is not as important for Google for now but you should look that it should not be used too many times on your web page so that it will not hurt your relevancy factor for ranking.
- Latent Semantic Indexing Keywords in Content:Contents of a webpage is crawled by a search engine which has most common words or phrases are collected & identified as the keywords which also extract meaning from words with more than one meaning.
- LSI Keywords in Title and Description Tags: As with webpage content, LSI keywords in page Meta tags can help Google to recognize between synonyms.
- Page Loading Speed via HTML:Page loading speed as a ranking factor. Search Engine calculate its accurate loading speed depend on file size and page size of particular website.
- Duplicate Content: Same or identical content on two sites may influence ranking of webpage in SERP’s & may have negative impact for site. Slightly identical content can also face duplicate content issues.
- Rel=Canonical:It’s as important factor for Google. This tag is used for preventing search engine from considering duplicate content on pages.
- Page Loading Speed via Chrome: Google uses Chrome data to get a better understand a page’s loading time as it consider server speed, CDN usage and other non HTML-related site speed signals.
- Image Optimization: Image optimization can be done by implementing alt tag, title, description and caption to particular image as it is considered as most relevant ranking factor for Google.
- Recency of Content Updates: As user searches for different queries with respective to time E.g. Occasion festivals etc. Google shows date and time of web page so that it’s been considered as relevant ranking factor.
- Magnitude of Content Updates: This factor signifies that content should be updated or remove & change whole content frequently on web page. Just slight changes of few words will not work instead replace it all.
- Historical Updates Page Updates:It signifies frequency of web page have been updated; also play a vital role in freshness of content.
- Keyword Prominence: It signifies that your targeted keyword should appear in the first 100-words of a web page’s content appears so that it will be a good relevancy factor.
- Keyword in H2, H3 Tags: Having your targeted keyword appear as a subheading in H2 or H3 format can be considered as weak relevancy signal.
- Keyword Word Order:Here is 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. E.g.: Search for: “SEO Techniques”. A page optimized for the phrase “SEO techniques” will rank better than a page optimized for “techniques for SEO”.
- Outbound Link Quality: Outbound from your web page to another authorized site helps Google trust your site more.
- Outbound Link Theme:Search Engine may use your linked content to another site may be considered as ranking factor. E.g. if you have Page related to car and you link outbound your link to some movies page then Google will consider your page is related to ‘Car Movies’ not for automobile.
- Grammar and Spelling: Good grammar & no spelling mistakes are considered as quality content as well as important factor for ranking.
- Syndicated Content: Go through whether your content on the page is unique? If it’s copied from any indexed page of SERP’s it will not rank & also end up in theirSupplemental Index.
- Helpful Supplementary Content: Helpful supplementary content indicates the page’s quality & have a good effect in ranking. E.g.: currency converters, loan interest calculators, interactive recipes and more.
- Number of Outbound Links: Avoid using too many dofollow outbound links on your page. It may “leak” PageRank, which can also decrease that page’s rankings.
- Multimedia:Images, videos and other multimedia stuffs indicated good content & quality factor.
- Number of Internal Links Pointing to Page:I f you have number of internal links to a page it will indicates its importance related to other pages on the site.
- 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.
- Broken Links:If your website have too many broken links on a web page this indicates a sign of abandoned site.
- Reading Level: Google gives you reading level statistics. Basic reading level will help you rank better because that will be appealing to the masses.
- Affiliate Links: Actually affiliate links on your pages probably won’t hurt your rankings. But don’t just put too many links as Google’s algorithm will go through internal links to check whether it’s a thin affiliate site.
- HTML errors/W3C validation: Lots of HTML errors are considered as a sign of a poor quality site.
- Page Host’s Domain Authority: Things being equal a page on an authoritative domain is always higher than a page on a domain with less authority.
- Page’s PageRank: This is not that important factor to be considered but still in SERP’s high page rank sites ranks well in comparison to low page rank site.
- URL Length:Too long URL may affect ranking in SERP’s.
- URL Path: A page closer to the homepage may get the authority boost in ranking.
- Human Editors: Google has its own system that allows human editors to influence the results.
- Page Category: A page that’s part of a closely related category should get a relevancy signal as compared to a page that’s field under an unrelated category.
- WordPress Tags: Tags are WordPress specific site are one of the important relevancy factor.
- Keyword in URL: Keywords including in your URL is one of important ranking factor.
- URL String: Breadcrumbs we can call it as. The categories in the URL string are read by Google and may provide an important signal to what a page is describing about.
- References and Sources:Citing references and sources e.g. like research papers is a sign of quality factor for site. The must be authorized or high PR sites.
- Bullets and Numbered Lists: Bullets and numbered lists in your page content may help your user to understand it easily and making it user friendly.
- Priority of Page in Sitemap:The priority a page is given via the sitemap.xml file may influence you ranking factor.
- Too Many Outbound Links: Too many outbound links may distract your user from your main content also obscuring your page.
- Quantity of Other Keywords Page Ranks For:Also focus on other secondary keywords on your page; it will influence in your ranking too.
- Page Age:Yeah it’s true that Google prefer new and fresh content but also old page with newly updated content can also add quality factor to site.
- User Friendly Layout: The page layout on highest quality pages makes your Content immediately visible and crawled by search engine.
- Parked Domains: Now days Google don’t prefer Parked domains as before.
- Useful Content: This factor is distinguished between quality and useful content from web page.
SITE LEVEL FACTOR
- Content Provides Value and Unique Insights: Under insights of Google; it hits the thin affiliated site to bring out something new and fresh sites to its users.
- Contact Us Page: Google Quality Document defines that they prefer sites which has appropriate amount of contact information which would relate to its websites.
- Domain Trust/Trust Rank: Site trust is defined by measure of inbound links to your site from high quality and trusted sites & it is considered as most important ranking factors.
- Site Architecture: Your website structure defined by how you have categorized by your sub pages which help Google to index it appropriately.
- Site Updates:How often your site and its structure is changed defines site updates.
- Number of Pages:Site should content more web pages to be crawled and indexed. At least a large number of pages can help you get hit from thin affiliate site signal.
- Presence of Sitemap:A sitemap helps search engines index your pages easier and more thoroughly also improves visibility.
- Site Uptime: Lots of crawl errors and time taken for site maintenance or server issues may hurt your site ranking in SERP’s.
- Server Location: This is important factor in which your server location influence where your site ranks in different geographical regions.
- SSL Certificate: SSL Certificates and that using HTTP’s are preferred as high ranking factor for Google.
- Terms of Service and Privacy Pages: These two pages of site confirm trust of user coming to your site. A trustworthy signal for ranking factors.
- Duplicate Meta Information On-Site: Duplicate Meta information on your site may bring down all of your page’s visibility.
- Breadcrumb Navigation: This is a style of user-friendly site-architecture that helps users know where they are on a site:
- Mobile Optimized:Mobile Optimization refers that how responsive is your site on each mobile devices whether a tab a desktop or a Mobile
- YouTube:YouTube is owned by Google itself so it gives more preference to videos uploaded on YouTube is considered as important ranking factor.
- Site Usability: Sites which difficult to navigate can hurt ranking by reducing time of user spend on site, i.e. pages viewed and bounce rate.
- Use of Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools: Having these two tools installed on your site can improve your page’s indexing. They may also directly influence rank by giving as Google gets more data to work with.
- User reviews/Site reputation:Review on websites business listing sites play an important role having quality signal.
BACKLINK FACTOR
- Linking Domain Age: Backlink count from old age domain may consider as good ranking factor.
- # of Linking Root Domains:The number of referring domain may influence you ranking in SERP’s.
- # of Links from Separate C-Class IPs: Links from separate class-c IP addresses suggest a wider breadth of sites linking to you.
- # of Linking Pages: Pages linking to more sites even if it’s from same domain is considered as ranking factor.
- Alt Tag (for Image Links): As we say crawler can’t read images; we can give an Alt Tag for images on site can be a quality ranking factor.
- Links from .edu or .gov Domains: If your site getting link from educational and government sites then it is considered as quality factor.
- Authority of Linking Page: The authority (PageRank) of the referring page is an important ranking factor.
- Authority of Linking Domain: The referring domain’s authority may play an independent role in a link’s importance.
- Links from Competitors:Links from competitor website for targeted keyword is considered as important factor.
- Social Shares of Referring Page: More amounts of page links on social network are considered as good ranking factor.
- Links from Bad Neighborhoods:Bad neighborhoods link may get penalty and may affect your ranking.
- Guest Posts:Guest posting is defined as links coming especially from author bio area is considered as white hat SEO campaigns.
- Links to Homepage Domain that Page Sites On:Links to a referring page’s homepage may play special importance in evaluating a site’s and thus is a referred as link’s weight.
- Nofollow Links: “In general, we don’t follow them.” Having a certain % of nofollow links may also indicate a natural vs. unnatural link.
- Diversity of Link Types:Having an unnaturally large percentage of your links come from a single source (i.e. forum profiles, blog comments) may be a sign of web spam. On the other hand, links from diverse sources is a sign of a natural link profile.
- “Sponsored Links” Or Words Around Link: For Google words like “sponsors”, “link partners” & “sponsored links” decreases value of that link.
- Contextual Links: Links feed inside a content of page are considered more quality link than links on empty page or that can be found elsewhere on the page.
- Excessive 301 Redirects to Page: Try to avoid excess of 301 redirect links of your site links. It may affect sites ranking or indexing too.
- Backlink Anchor Text: Anchor text is less important than before. But it still sends a strong relevancy signal in small amount.
- Internal Link Anchor Text: It is another relevancy signal as compared to backlink anchor text.
- Link Title Attribution: It is the text that appears when you hover over any link is considered as a weak relevancy signals.
- Country TLD of Referring Domain:Try to generate links from country-specific extensions such as .au, .in, .co.uk etc. It may help you rank better in that particular country.
- Link Location in Content: Remember links should be included in content but in somehow in starting only. As links in end of content has no weight age as compared to starting one.
- Link Location on Page:As per this factor; links included in main content of site is considered as more important as compared to link from footer or other place on web page.
- Linking Domain Relevancy:Links to your site from relevant site instead getting it from different domain is considered as most important and quality signal.
- Page Level Relevancy:The Hilltop Algorithm defines that link from a page that’s closely linked to page’s content is more powerful than a link which is related to an unrelated page.
- Text around Link: Google can figure out links to your site is a recommendation or part of a negative review. That’s why links with positive sentiments around them likely carry more weight.
- Keyword in Title: Google prefer sites having their targeted keywords in their Page Title.
- Positive Link Velocity: A site with positive link velocity usually gets a SERP boost.
- Negative Link Velocity:Negative link velocity can reduce rankings as it’s a signal of decreasing popularity.
- Links from “Hub” Pages:Try to get links from pages that are considered as top resources on a various topics are given special preference.
- Link from Authority Sites: A link from authority site is helpful in link juicing for a small or new websites considered as quality factor.
- Linked to as Wikipedia Source: Though links are no follow but it still links from Wikipedia sources are considered as quality signal for ranking.
- Co-Occurrences:The word appearing around your backlink also a quality signal.
- Backlink Age:Older links have more ranking power than newly minted backlinks defined as backlink age parameter.
- Links from Real Sites vs. Blogs: Google gives more weight to links coming from “real sites” than from fake blogs. They likely use brand and user-interaction signals to distinguish between that two.
- Natural Link Profile: A site with a “natural” link is going to rank highly and also considered as durable for updates.
- Reciprocal Links: Page lists “Excessive link exchanging” as a link scheme to avoid.
- User Generated Content Links:Google is able to identify links generated from UGC vs. the actual site owner. For example, they know that a link from the official WordPress.com blog at en.blog.wordpress.com isvery different than a link from besttoasterreviews.wordpress.com.
- Links from 301:The links redirected by 301 can lose link juice as compared to direct links.
- Schema.org Microformats: Pages that supports microformats is quality factor to boost ranking in SERP’s. It is also fact that it gets higher CTR than other links.
- DMOZ Listed: It’s said that if you list your site on Dmoz directory; Google trusts that site as compared to other
- TrustRank of Linking Site: The trustworthiness of the site linking to you determines how much “TrustRank” gets passed onto you.
- Number of Outbound Links on Page:A link on a page with hundreds of OBLs passes less PR than a page with only a few.
- Forum Profile Links: Google significantly devalue your site links if coming from forums profile because of industrial level spamming concept.
- Word Count of Linking Content: If you are getting link from 1000 words content instead a 25 word snippet than it is considered as quality parameter.
- Quality of Linking Content: If you are getting links to your site from well written and multimedia quality content than you may get boost in ranking in SERP’s.
- Sitewide Links:Sitewide links are “compressed” to count as a single link.
USER INTERACTION
- Organic Click Through Rate for a Keyword: Pages getting more CTR may boost your ranking in SERP’s for that particular keywords.
- Organic CTR for All Keywords: A pages organic CTR for all keywords is ranks for may be a human-based, user interaction signal.
- Bounce Rate: Pages where user gets quickly bounced can get less trust by Google’s algorithm.
- Direct Traffic: Sites with lots of direct traffic are likely higher quality than sites that get very little direct traffic.
- Repeat Traffic: They may also look at whether or not users go back to a site after visiting. Sites with repeat visitors may consider as quality parameter.
- BlockedSites: Panda algorithm uses this feature as quality factor for site.
- Chrome Bookmarks:Pages that get bookmarked in Chrome might get a boost because Google uses its Chrome data from cache also.
- Google Toolbar Data: However, besides page loading speed and malware, it’s not known what kind of data they glean from the toolbar. It is statedthat Google uses toolbar data as a ranking factor.
- Number of Comments: Number of comment to page defines number of people’s interaction & engagement which is considered as quality factor.
- Dwell Time: “dwell time “defines how long people spend time on your page when coming from a Google SERP’s. If people spend a lot of time on your site, that may be used as a quality signal.
SPECIAL ALGORITHM RULES
- Query Deserves Freshness: Google prefer new queries from search bar & help boosting that link.
- Query Deserves Diversity:Here try to ambiguous keywords; it means keywords having more than one meaning.
- User Browsing History: Google prefers user browsing data to show them related searches depending upon your search query.
- User Search History: For example, if you search for “reviews” then search for “training”, Google is more likely to show training review sites higher in the results. This search chain is considered as important factor for ranking.
- Geo Targeting: Google gives preference to sites with a local server IP and country-specific domain name extension.
- Safe Search: This one of the important factor as search results having curse words or adult content won’t appear for people who have their Safe Search turned on.
- Google+ Circles: As Google is service by Google itself therefore Google shows higher results for sites that you’ve added to your Google Plus pages or circles.
- DMCA Complaints:It will lower down the ranking of a site, if it has received a large number of DMCA request. Especially pirated sites will be badly affected.
- Domain Diversity: It is also called as “Bigfoot Update” supposedly added more domains to each SERP page.
- Transactional Searches: It defines that Sometimes Google can show you different search results for queries related to online shopping.
- Local Searches: A quality parameter so called as it shows Google business list pages on top of SERP’s.
- Google News Box: This parameter defines that some of search queries shows you result in terms of News.
- Big Brand Preference: This parameter is useful for big brands in market which also shows results depending on short tail keywords.
- Shopping Results: This stated that Google shows display ads in some of organic searches.
- Image Results:Google shows organic listings for image results for search results which are commonly used on Google Image Search.
- Easter Egg Results: Google has a dozen or soEaster Egg results. For example, when you search for “Atari Breakout” in Google image search, the search results turn into a playable game (!). Shout out to Victor Pan for this one.
- Single Site Results for Brands:The links which are domain or brand-oriented keywords bring upsmore results from the same website.
SOCIAL SIGNALS
- Number of Tweets: Just like links if you the tweets a web page it may influence its rank in SERP’s.
- Authority of Twitter Users Accounts: If you are links coming from authorized twitter accounts which has more followers than following than it is a quality factor.
- Number of Facebook Likes: It’s that Google consider the number of Facebook likes a page receives as a weak ranking signal as it can’t see Facebook account.
- Facebook Shares: Yes! Facebook shares are considered as backlink as links. So it must be considered as most important factor for ranking too.
- Authority of Facebook User Accounts: Same like twitter if your Facebook’s post is shared by branded or popular pages it’s considered as quality factor.
- Pinterest Pins:Considers Pinterest Pins is a quality social signal as it is most popular social media network with public data.
- Votes on Social Sharing Sites: Links shared on sites like Reddit, Stumbleupon and Digg is another social factor considered by Google for ranking.
- Number of Google+1’s: Though its Google’s social network still it’s been ignored by Google. Not that strongly recommended as compared to other networks.
- Authority of Google+ User Accounts: Google give weight age as +1’s coming from authoritative accounts. Here authorized accounts are preferred as compared to accounts with many followers.
- Known Authorship: Google determine influential content producers online depending upon their authorities can give you a boost in rankings in SERP’s.
- Social Signal Relevancy: Google probably uses relevancy information from the account sharing the content and the text surrounding the link.
- Site Level Social Signals:Social signals in site may increase its presence in SERP’s and boost ranking.
BRAND SIGNAL FACTORS
- Brand Name Anchor Text: Anchor text given to brand name; actually looks simple but yet strong signal for boost ranking.
- Branded Searches: If people search for your site in Google (e.g. “Bridgestone twitter”, Bridgestone + “manufacturing”); Google takes this into consideration when determining a brand. It is another signal for ranking.
- Site Has Facebook Page and Likes: Every brand should have its own Facebook fan page along with likes too.
- Site has Twitter Profile with Followers: When your followers are more compared to following is considered as trusted and verified accounts.
- Official LinkedIn Company Page: It states that your company is real with no fake information as LinkedIn is most popular professional network.
- Employees Listed at LinkedIn:More and more LinkedIn profiles linked to particular company’s LinkedIn page; it is considered as quality factor.
- Legitimacy of Social Media Accounts: A social media account with 10,000 followers and 2 posts is probably interpreteda lot differently than another 10,000-follower strong account with lots of interaction.
- Brand Mentions on News Sites: Actually big brands like Addidas, Nokia or else are tagged in news feed section by Google is really a good signal.
- Co-Citations: It means that brands get mentioned without getting linked to means which are not hyper linked.
- Number of RSS Subscribers:Google looks at RSS Subscriber data as a popularity signal for brands as it has its own RSS Subscriber.
- Google+ Local Listing: As real businesses have offices. Google looks out for location data to determine whether site is big brand or not.
- Website is Tax Paying Business:Google may consider that your site is associated with a tax paying business or not.
ON SITE WEB-SPAM FACTORS
- Panda Penalty: If your site has low-quality content then they would be less visible in search if get hit by Panda penalty.
- Links to Bad Neighborhoods: If you sites having links from bad neighborhood than it may get hit by Panda penalty.
- Redirects: If wrongly redirected to sneaky sites than if would definitely get penalized by Panda.
- Pop-ups or Distracting Ads: If your site is having too much of pop-up ads & if its distracting its seems to be a low quality site.
- Site Over-Optimization:This includes On-page factors like keyword stuffing, header tag stuffing or excessive keyword decoration may lead to hit by panda.
- Page Over-Optimization:Unlike Panda; Penguin targets individual page even then just for certain search keywords.
- Ads above the Fold: Panda penalizes site which has too much of ads on same web page instead of content.
- Hiding Affiliate Links: It comes under cloaking; if your site is trying hiding affiliated links in different way than it would get penalized by Panda.
- Affiliate Sites: Google puts affiliated sites under higher scrutiny as it doesn’t o more like affiliated sites.
- Auto generated Content: You site can get penalized or de-indexed if suspected your site is pumping out computer-generated content.
- Excess PageRank Sculpting: Going too far withPageRank sculpting following all outbound links or most internal links indicates that you are trying to distract search engine.
- IP Address Flagged as Spam:Your sites ranking may get down if your IP address is flagged as spam by Google.
- Meta Tag Spamming:If you’re adding keywords to your Meta tags to distract the algorithm than it may hit your site with a penalty.
OFF PAGE WEB-SPAM FACTORS
- Unnatural Influx of Links: An unnatural influx of links is a fire sign of phony links.
- Penguin Penalty: If hit by Penguin penalty than it may hurt your ranking.
- Link Profile with High % of Low Quality Links:Links coming from low quality sites or links mostly part of black hat SEO. So try getting links from high PR sites.
- Linking Domain Relevancy:If your links to site are unnatural and not coming from related sites it may get hit by penguin.
- Unnatural Links Warning: When your site getting message from Webmaster of detecting unnatural links it must presides that it will be affecting your ranking.
- Links from the Same Class C IP: Getting an unnatural amount of links from sites on the same server IP may be a sign of blog network link building.
- “Poison” Anchor Text: Links that are placed throughout website with identical anchor text are commonly known as Poison Anchor Text. Try to avoid this as it will affect your ranking.
- Selling Links:Selling links can definitely impacttoolbar PageRank and may hurt your search visibility.
- Google Sandbox:Google Sandbox is a part where new sites were put that get a sudden influx of links is sometimes which can limits search visibility.
- Disavow Tool: Disavow Tool remove a manual or algorithmic penalty for sites that were the victims of negative optimization.