As you may know, Google has over 200 parameters in its search algorithm. It’s constantly changing and the objective of
flickr / alain bachellier
SEOs (aka search engine optimizers aka geeks who’s primary goal is to get on Google’s first results page) has always been to find out which were these factors and what was the weight of each of its elements. It’s like the magic recipe to success.
This week, a thread was started in Webmasterworld.com about these 200 parameters. Someone tried to make a complete list and then some SEOs around the world tried to complete this list. It doesn’t include any weighting factors (resp. how important is each of the elements) and there is nothing confirming that all these factors are being considered by Google, but it was the first time I’d seen such a complete list. As it’s spread through tens of replies over several pages with many comments around, I’ve tried to summarize and somehow structure these 200 elements.
Domain
1. Age of Domain
2. History of domain
3. KWs in domain name
4. Sub domain or root domain
5. TLD of Domain
6. IP address of domain
7. Location of IP address / Server Datacenter
8. History of past penalties for this domain
9. History of past penalties for this owner
10. Taxonomy flag for general category (transactional, informational, navigational)
11. Taxonomy flag for freshness
12. Taxonomy flag for market niche
13. Architecture HTML structure
14. Use of Headers tags URL path
15. JS files
CSS processing
16. Use of external CSS
17. CSS code embedded on the code or included or on an external fileN
18. Navigation and architecture, or having 800 links in the page template.
Content
19. Keyword density of page
20. Keyword presence in Title Tag
21. Keyword position in title
22. Keyword in filename
23. Keyword in Meta Description (Not Meta Keywords)
24. Keyword in header tags (H1, H2 etc)
25. Keyword in body text
26. Freshness of Content
27. Frequency of Edits
28. % of Page Effected (Changed) by Page Edits
29. Uniqueness of Content
30. Word emphasis (bold, italics, underline)
31. Positioning of most relevant words on page
32. Synonyms relating to theme of page/site
33. Alt tags (of images)
34. Graphic file names
35. Promimity of graphics to supporting text
36. Image quality/resolution ( image search )
37. Semantic information (phrase-based indexing and co-occurring phrase indicators)
38. Geolocation
39. Tags, comments, (video search )
Linking
General
40. Link Rot vs All Links Functional
41. Social signals reinforcement ( RT’s, diggs, etc )
42. Internal Cross Linking
43. No of internal links to page
44. Location of link on page
45. Cluster of Links: Uniqueness of Class C address
46. Anchor text of FIRST text link (Bruce Clay’s point at PubCon)
Per Inbound Link
47. Quality of website linking in
48. Quality of web page linking in
49. Age of website
50. Age of web page
51. Relevancy of page’s content
52. Location of link (Footer, Navigation, Body text)
53. Anchor text
54. Title attribute of link
55. Alt tag of images linking
56. Country specific TLD
57. Domain Authority TLD (.edu, .gov)
58. Location of server
59. Authority Link (CNN, BBC, etc)
Link density
60. Percentage of words on the page are linked words. (All links = 100% density, no linked words = 0% link density) A page that’s all links is bad.
61. Non-Link word count: How many words on a page are not links? More words that are not links is a general indication of more “real” content on a page.
How to get penalties
62. Over Optimisation
63. Purchasing Links
64. Selling Links
65. Comment Spamming
66. Cloaking
67. Hidden Text
68. Duplicate Content
69. Keyword stuffing
70. Manual penalties
71. Sandbox effect (Probably the same as age of domain)
Query related factors
72. Intent behind query ? Informational / Transactional / Navigational
73. Personalization turned on
74. Datacenter
75. Query IP
76. The number of impressions a domain receives in Google SERPs overall. Especially when that number spikes, it’s been mentioned in patents as a possible spam signal.
Miscellaneous
77. JavaScript Links
78. No Follow Links
79. User interaction / satisfaction with results
80. The quality of advertisers that a site runs
81. Performance / Load of a website
82. Speed of JS
For those who want to concentrate on the most important factors, I strongly recommend SEOMoz ranking factors, which are based on a survey conducted every two years among top SEO experts by SEOMoz.
[...] Voici une rapide traduction d’un article anglais que vous pourrez trouver ici : http://daviddouek.com/google-seo-secret-algorithm-revealed [...]
A lot of these points are very dated and have been proven not to be ranking factors. It’s also a bit misleading – you have “JS links” as a ranking factor, but in reality this is just a content indexibility factor – if your links are pulled in via JS, the search engine spiders might not be able to read them (Google has said they are looking at ways to process more JavaScript content, so it may be theh case that they are already doing this on some sites).
Having said that, this list would be useful for someone who is new to SEO and is trying to understand what Google is up to.
@Scott I agree. The list is not perfect. I tried however to reproduce the list as I found on Webmasterworld, without adding my own point of view. I’d have changed a few things as well, but thought it was interesting to put all parameters, without censure.
Regarding the javascript links, I think however they can be a factor. Most search engine can now understand simple javascript, which means they can be treated similarly to normal links. So playing with JS links (either by using more complex JS to hide the links or limiting the number of JS links) can have an effect.
@scott: so which factors are dated and definitely proven not to be ranking factors in this list then?
@david: if we talk about “algorithm” it would also be interesting to have some discussion/guesses to what role the different factors play in the algorithm – which are addends, subtrahends, multiplier, what are max./min. thresholds…?
@andreas it’s true, maybe the post’s title is not precise enough, but I found it catchy
I am planning to do another post focusing on the weight of the different elements, but I prefer waiting for caffeine to be released, so that i can directly include any important changes in the summary