Tag: ranking factors

Changes in Google Ranking Factors – 2016
What is and isn’t a ranking factor in search? Here are the latest thoughts by industry experts on search ranking factors and particularly Google Ranking Factors as they are in 2016.

Content & Links Are the Two Most Important Ranking Signals

Eric Enge noted in a post that he participated in a Hangout with Google’s Andrey Lippatsev, Search Quality Senior Strategist, who was asked about the top 3 ranking signals, noting that RankBrain was announced as the third most important. “I can tell you what they are. It’s content and links going into your site,” answered Lippatesev.

“When you aren’t facing page relevance or quality issues, links can, and do, continue to significantly impact rankings.” said Enge.

“Backlinks remain an extremely important Google ranking factor,” said Brian Dean founder of Backlinko in a recent blog post on Google Ranking Factors. “We found the number of domains linking to a page correlated with rankings more than any other factor.” Read more on the Backlinko Ranking Study at the end of this article.

RankBrain – Third Most Important Factor

Danny Sullivan of SearchEngineLand wrote an interesting piece on how RankBrain has now become the third most important ranking factor behind content and links. According to a report onBackChannel RankBrain is being used on almost ALL search queries helping determine the most relevant results and their order:

Google is characteristically fuzzy on exactly how it improves search (something to do with the long tail? Better interpretation of ambiguous requests?) but Jeff Dean says that RankBrain is “involved in every query,” and affects the actual rankings “probably not in every query but in a lot of queries.” What’s more, it’s hugely effective. Of the hundreds of “signals” Google search uses when it calculates its rankings (a signal might be the user’s geographical location, or whether the headline on a page matches the text in the query), RankBrain is now rated as the third most useful.

Click-Through Rate (CTR) is Not a Ranking Factor

“I think we can establish that CTR is not a direct ranking signal for Google. At the same time, it can have an indirect effect,” said Eric Enge in a recent video (below) they posted on their marketing website Stone Temple Consulting. “Lots of people clicking on a certain result might indicate a real interest in it, and that might mean it’s a better result than the result above it. Notice I said might there. That will be important later. Anyway, many people have assumed that search engines like Google would use such a signal, of course, bouncing it off against other signals that it uses in ranking.”

So with that answer, one wonders why isn’t then CTR a ranking signal? Primarily because Google has told us they don’t, commented Enge. He noted that it’s simply too easy to game and that it doesn’t necessarily mean the user was satisfied with the result. Google uses it internally for studying search behavior but it is not a ranking signal. He provided this chart in a recent blog post. Enge wrote another article about CTR as a (non) ranking factor here.

Google Confirms 301, 302, 3xx redirects Do Not Lose PageRank Value

“30x redirects don’t lose PageRank anymore,” Google’s Gary Illyes said in a tweet yesterday. Eric Enge asked Illyes in a Twitter reply if the redirects are “not even a dampening factor?” Illyes replied, “@stonetemple for PageRank, no.” Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Land has more.

Local Business Ranking Factors

2016 Quantitative Local Search Ranking Factors Study: If you want your business to rank better in local search results, focus on building popularity for your business, as the results of the study indicate that business popularity seems to outweigh all other factors, most importantly in the form of reviews and quality backlinks to your site. Google Review and Profile View are by far the two most important local business ranking factors.

Dan Leibson, Vice President of Local & Product at Local SEO Guide, made a presentation on this study at SMX Advanced 2016:

Mobile-Friendliness – a Ranking Signal on Mobile Searches

“Last year, we started using mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal on mobile searches,” said Klemen Kloboves, a software engineer at Google, in a Google Webmaster blog post. “Today we’re announcing that beginning in May, we’ll start rolling out an update to mobile search results that increases the effect of the ranking signal to help our users find even more pages that are relevant and mobile-friendly.”

Google Now Ranks Mobile Page Speed Separately

Jennifer Slegg of The SEM Post noted that Illyes mention of this at Search Marketing Summit Sydney was the first time that Google confirmed that it indeed plans to make page speed a factor in its next mobile friendly update. Illyes told Jennnifer that the update will be in a matter of months. Illyes has been hinting at mobile friendly sites ranking higher for months.

Google Updates Search Quality Guidelines

“We recently completed a major revision of our rater guidelines to adapt to this mobile world, recognizing that people use search differently when they carry internet-connected devices with them all the time,” said Mimi Underwood, Sr. Program Manager of Google Search Growth & Analysis. “You can find that update here (PDF).”

More Causes for Lower Ranking

Enge also says that there are other factors contributing to less appearance of a site on the first page of a Google search result, which is in effect a lower ranking:
1. More real estate allocated to paid search
2. More content from other sources, such as image search, YouTube, and the other factors I mentioned above
3. Some pages that have less than 10 web results
4. Portions of the web results that are clearly less driven by links, such as local web, query deserves diversity, and in-depth article results
Backlinko Study

The Backlinko Study is unbelievably helpful in understanding all ranking factors, not just the new ones that happened in 2016. Backlinko analyzed 1 million Google search results to answer the question: Which factors correlate with first page search engine rankings?

Backlinko identified 11 main ranking factors that I’ve summarized below:
1. Backlinks are still the number one factor in determining search ranking.
2. Site Authority correlates to ranking.
3. Tightly focused content ranks better.
4. Longer content ranks higher.
5. Sites using HTTPS do better than equal sites using HTTP.
6. Schema markup doesn’t help.
7. An image in content raises ranking.
8. Small correlation with title tag keyword optimization and ranking.
9. Speed is now a huge ranking signal. It matters a lot.
10. Exact match anchor text has a strong influence.
11. Low bounce rate improves ranking.
July 27, 2016
Today On The Matt Cutts Show: Page Speed As A Ranking Factor

In Google’s latest Webmaster Help video, Matt Cutts discusses page speed and whether or not it’s a more important factor for mobile than for desktop.

The video is a response to the submitted question:

Is load speed a more important factor for mobile? Is it really something that can change your rankings, all the things being equal?

“Let’s start with the second part of that question: all things being equal,” Cutts begins. “If your site is really, really slow, we’ve said that we do use page speed in our rankings. And so all of the things being equal, yes, a site can rank lower. Now, we tend not to talk about things in terms of like an absolute number of seconds because websites do work differently in different parts of the world, and there’s different bandwidth and speeds in different parts of the world. However, it’s a good way to think about it to say, ‘Okay, look at your neighborhood of websites. Look at the sites that are returned along with you, and then if you’re the outlier. If you’re at the very bottom end because your site is really, really slow, then yes, it might be the case that your site will rank lower because of its page speed.”

“Now, what’s interesting is that that factor applies across the board,” he continues. “It’s not specific to mobile…it’s not that in mobile we apply that any more or less than we do for desktop search, but if you’re using your mobile phone, you do care a lot about whether it will load in a reasonable period of time. So we’ll continue to look at ways to improve the ways that we find out how fast a site is, the page speed for a particular page, and then try to figure out whether it makes sense…okay, if we want users to be less frustrated, then maybe it does make sense to incorporate that more into our rankings or more for mobile Something along those lines.”

About two years ago, Cutts said page speed affects rankings in about one out of a hundred searches, and that you shouldn’t overly stress about it. It’s unclear how much it matters now compared to then.

August 21, 2013
Google’s Matt Cutts Talks Facebook/Twitter Links’ Influence on Search Ranking

We recently looked at how Google and Bing use links on Twitter and Facebook for organic ranking, following an informative piece from Danny Sullivan on the matter. Google’s Matt Cutts has now addressed the subject a bit more in a new video uploaded to Googles’ Webmaster Help Channel.

Do you want social media to influence search rankings? Comment here.

"We do use Twitter and Facebook links in ranking as we always have in our web search rankings, but in addition we’re also trying to figure out a little bit about the reputation of an author or creator on Twitter or Facebook," says Cutts. "I filmed a video back in May 2010 where I said that we didn’t use that as a signal, and at the time, we did not use that as a signal, but now, we’re taping this in December 2010, and we are using that as a signal."

Now, this doesn’t mean that suddenly Twitter and Facebook links are the main ranking factor determining where your content is showing up in organic searches. If anything, Google seems to be tiptoeing into the waters in this area.

"The web search quality team has a lot of different groups in a lot of different offices, so people including the original Blog Search team, people who worked on Realtime Search…have been working on using these sorts of things as a signal," explains Cutts. "So primarily, it has been used a little bit more in the realtime sort of search, where you might see individual tweets or other links showing up, and streaming up on the page. We’re studying how much sense it makes to use it a little more widely within our web search rankings."

To reiterate, you’ll still see this playing more of a role in realtime search, but Google is "looking at it more broadly within web search as well," according to Cutts.

"Now, there’s a few things to remember," Cutts warns. "Number one is: if we can’t crawl a page (if we can’t see a page), then we can’t really assign PageRank to it, and it doesn’t really count. So if we’re able to obtain the data, then we can use it, but if for some reason a page is forbidden for us to crawl or if we’re not able to obtain it somehow, then we wouldn’t be able to use it within our rankings."

This would appear to mean that links within Facebook will not mean a whole lot when the user isn’t sharing their updates with everyone. Many Facebook users have their privacy settings adjusted to only share with their friends. While Facebook may have far more users than Twitter, privacy settings will greatly reduce that number in terms of links that will potentially help your search rankings.

"This is something that is used relatively lightly for now, and we’ll see how much we use it over time depending on how useful it is and how robust it ends up being," says Cutts. "The one thing I would caution people about is don’t necessarily say to yourself, ‘Ha. Now I’m going to go out and get reciprocal follows, and I’m gonna get a ton of followers,’ just like people used to get a ton of links. In the same way that PageRank depends on not just the number of links, but the quality of those links, you have to think about what are the followers who mean quality. Who are the people who actually are not just bots or some software program or things like that."

Would you like to see Facebook/Twitter links carry more weight in organic search? Share your thoughts here.

Related: Google & Bing Are Looking at Links on Twitter & Facebook for Organic Ranking

December 21, 2010