2007 Ranking Factors Report

[wyspa03]

The latest "Ranking Factors V2" released. The article and its layout is top notch. I’ve thought I have to post here. I’m a little surprise that age of domain is influencing SERP more that “Link Popularity of Site in Topical Community” factor...

[optimalwebsite]

Interesting read, but nothing really new there. Does anyone else think it strange how Google and others stress "positive user experience" as a general catch all for improving a website's ranking, but never go into any detail as to what this is? I wonder if they sit on vast research in terms of what defines this, or monitor a website's bounce rate... hmmm.... food for thought.

[stymiee]

Considering the source I'd say that information is useless.

[janeth]

I have to say that I am a little confused by the article.

He says that code being validated is a 1.3 then to back that up he post this.

Aaron Wall
If you can get designers to think that your stuff is better because it validates more of them will pay attention to you, subscribe to your feed, and link at your site. Otherwise, I believe validation is somewhat overhyped.

Mike McDonald
Validation? Please, oh please, make it go away. Validation zealots just plain freak me out. Walking under ladders, breaking mirrors and stepping on cracks probably has more influence on your SERPs than validation.

Lucas Ng (aka shor)
Adam Lasnik from Google mentioned that rewarding validation & accessibility of documents would be a 'slippery slope'.

Now maybe it is just me but I do not see those comments proving anything. I did not look at anything else but if the rest of the article is the same?

[randfish]

John - why is it that you wouldn't trust information provided by SEOmoz? And, even if that were the case, this is the collected wisdom of 37 folks in the search industry, all of whom I personally have great respect for; is it your opinion that the vast majority of these contributors aren't informed?

Janeth - the "1.3" means that the average of all the votes from the 37 participants was a 1.3. This tells me that a massive number voted "1" - "Does Not Influence Ranking." I'm of the impression that you didn't read the document closely.

[janeth]

Originally Posted by randfish

Janeth - the "1.3" means that the average of all the votes from the 37 participants was a 1.3. This tells me that a massive number voted "1" - "Does Not Influence Ranking." I'm of the impression that you didn't read the document closely.

I did not spend much time on it but will go back and look some more now that I understand the numbers.

[incrediblehelp]

My comments:

1. Nice to see many experts agree that relevant OBL's matter.
2. I am also surprised to see so many saying age of document matters so much.
3. "Amount of Indexable Text Content" not so sure about this one. Are they talking text to code ratio? If so booo on them. I don't believe that for a moment. If it is just the amount of text on the page, then that is far fetched as well.
4. Would think this would get a higher vote...."Organization/Hierarchy of Document Flow "
5. "Topical Relevance of Inbound Links to Site"....how was this not a 5, lol?
6. "Historical Performance of Site as Measured by Time Spent on Page, Clickthroughs from SERPs, Direct Visits, Bookmarks, etc."....I bet this one will be growing greatly over the next year with personalization.
7. "Age of Link".....I would have believed this would have been higher weighted than just 3.1. Pretty important to me.
8. "PageRank (as measured by the GG Toolbar) of Linking Page"...2.5 are you serious? Less than zero for me
9. I really enjoyed the reading of the negatively impacting factors. We talk so much on what helps in forums, why not what hurts.
10. I cant believe so many don't see personalization effecting search in the near term or ever!!!

Overall it was a nice easy read, but like said above nothing terribly new for the experienced online marketer. For a newbie, however, see the popular names attached quotes on each subject is very reassuring.

[janeth]

Maybe nothing new but it was nice to see where everyone thinks things stand.

No 5's, not even the title tag got a 5.

[dburdon]

Nice structure.

However, I do worry when I see a group of self-selecting experts produce subjective material with implied definitiveness. See Hans Christian Andersen's, Emperor's New Clothes.

Search engine marketing is not like the wine or fashion industries. In the end there's empirical output to support one's own use of ranking factors and influences. Don't change a successful search programme that appears to work because its utilising unfashionable techniques.

However, although the list opens with a caveat that its not trying to reverse engineer the Google algorithm its certainly looks like a good attempt to do so.

[incrediblehelp]

Good post Burdon.

[mantawebsolutions]

I really enjoyed the read through. As was said, nothing totally new, but I think that was never the point here. Rand and friends just confirmed what we all know, or ought to know.

It is good to sometimes just look back at all of these ranking factors to evaluate where you are in the SEO playing field and nod along with the comments that you agree on and think over and evaluate the ones you don't agree with.

Each aspect, however small, play a part in good SEO. This is something many site owners do not understand and that is why SEO is often misunderstood.

So, the score that each factor got was not really a revelation, but what stood out for me was the overall amount of factors that influence a sites performance. Some are more important than others, but they are mostly all influencing your site's performance.

To me the sections pertaining to "Keyword Use Factors", "Page Attributes", "Site/Domain Attributes" and "Inbound Link Attribute" were good but what good is a site (any site) if "Negative Crawling/Ranking Attributes" are not in place or corrected.

[nelsonez]

Originally Posted by mantawebsolutions

It is good to sometimes just look back at all of these ranking factors to evaluate where you are in the SEO playing field and nod along with the comments that you agree on and think over and evaluate the ones you don't agree with.

Agreed, it is nice to see that the techniques that we have been using have been somewhat validated by other experts in the field.

The discussions on topical IBL's and topical OBL's for that matter are quite interesting. It should not be so surprising though as you only need to put yourself in the shoes of the searcher. When they do a search they want to find good relevant content that has alot of relevant links for additional research and exploration. I think the difficulty for Google and the other search engines is walking the tight-rope between allowing more weight to a (good) directory site or a content site. Which is more useful to a searcher? Which structure can more easily game the system? I would contend that the SE's have to error on the side of not rewarding spammy directory sites.

[nelsonez]

Originally Posted by mantawebsolutions

It is good to sometimes just look back at all of these ranking factors to evaluate where you are in the SEO playing field and nod along with the comments that you agree on and think over and evaluate the ones you don't agree with.

Agreed, it is nice to see that the techniques that we have been using have been somewhat validated by other experts in the field.

The discussions on topical IBL's and topical OBL's for that matter are quite interesting. It should not be so surprising though as you only need to put yourself in the shoes of the searcher. When they do a search they want to find good relevant content that has alot of relevant links for additional research and exploration. I think the difficulty for Google and the other search engines is walking the tight-rope between allowing more weight to a (good) directory site or a content site. Which is more useful to a searcher? Which structure can more easily game the system? I would contend that the SE's have to error on the side of not rewarding spammy directory sites.

[jawn_tech]

Speaking of directories...

After giving this a good read-over, I think this made the short list in my root directory of my firefox bookmarks.

Just to be a stickler though, one thing that took away from it were lazy contributor comments like "see ___", or "same as ______", without expounding. With that many contributors, it's hard to remember who said what, and the reader shouldn't have to hunt for what they said elsewhere. So those comments were somewhat of wasted space.

Some of the items I could have predicted their consensus (or come close). Others were completely surprising. Nonetheless, interesting to read how different folks weighed in.

It's always enjoyable to read when our own Mike McDonald chimes in on the subject.

Great post wyspa03.

[Tubby]

maybe slightly off topic. But the thought did just occur to me that SEO to me is getting a little like religion. This thought occurred to me when having read the report, I decided that I did not believe it.

I do not think this dis-belief was totally logical. . I think it must simply be against my SEO religious beliefs.

Am I going nuts - Or do different web topics get different feedback from search engine results?

PS. my own conclusion on effective search results (based entirely on my own obsevations)

biggest factor in poor results - being lazy.
2nd biggest factor - opposition sites not being lazy.

[souravamant]

Do you think that these experts are really serious when it comes to reveal all the tricks from their bags....

I am not convinced here....

That report is not at all apealing to me atleat...

Sv

[Ne0]

Great Article!

on the code validation... I will say this - Yahoo give validated pages MUCH more importance than the Google Algo ever has (this is not from something I've read, it's from tests, that I've seen done first hand)

I've always been in the camp that validation doesn't matter - but after seeing what it did on Yahoo - it does matter if you like traffic from more than just Google ;)

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