Search Engine Ranking Factors

Ranking Factors

Every now and then Google slips insights into its algorithm's ranking factors. Here's a collection of variables based on observations of what those variables may be, but do be aware that the influence of these variable on ranking are subject to shift and even devaluation as search engines modify their algorithmic criteria.

Domain

• Age of Domain
• History of domain
• Keywords in domain name
• Sub domain or root domain?
• TLD of Domain
• IP address of domain
• Location of IP address / Server
• Architecture
• HTML structure
• Use of Headers tags
• URL path
• Use of external CSS / JS files
• Domain level link authority features
• Domain level keyword usage
• Domain level brand metrics
• Trust (authority of host domain

Content

• Keyword density of page
• Keyword in Title Tag
• Keyword in Meta Description (Not Meta Keywords)
• Keyword in KW in header tags (H1, H2 etc)
• Keyword in body text
• Freshness of Content
• Page level keyword usage
• Page level social metrics
• Page level traffic

Per Inbound Link

• Quality of website linking in
• Quality of web page linking in
• Age of website
• Age of web page
• Relevancy of page’s content
• Location of link (Footer, Navigation, Body text)
• Anchor text if link
• Title attribute of link
• Alt tag of images linking
• Country specific TLD domain
• Authority TLD (.edu, .gov)
• Location of server
• Authority Link (CNN, BBC, etc)

Cluster of Links

• Uniqueness of Class C address

Internal Cross Linking

• No of internal links to page
• Location of link on page
• Anchor text of FIRST text link

Penalties

• Over Optimization
• Purchasing Links
• Selling Links
• Comment Spamming
• Cloaking
• Hidden Text
• Duplicate Content
• Keyword stuffing
• Manual penalties
• Sandbox effect (Probably the same as age of domain)

Miscellaneous

• JavaScript Links
• No Follow Links
• Pending
• Performance / Load of a website
• Speed of JS

Misconceptions

• XML Sitemap (Aids the crawler but doesn’t help rankings)
• Page Rank (General Indicator of page’s performance)