They are not going to succeed. In the recent comment on the offensive Michelle Obama picture Google says: 'A site's ranking in Google's search results relies heavily on computer algorithms using thousands of factors to calculate a page's relevance to a given query.'. Not 200 but 'thousands of factors'.

According to Google their algorithm includes language models, query models, time models and personalization models. Maybe a variable in such a model is something like 'freshness of a page' and to determine the value of this variable there are lots of factors they look at.

I agree with Roland. I think it's a fool's chase to try to pin down all the factors. And there is no science behind any of these ranking factors lists.

I bet Matt Cutts, who has access to this data, wouldn't be able to get it exact (no offense).

So you're really just hoping Matt will hop in and say - "Can to!!! In alphabetical order, they're..."

Reverse psychology, Lewis. :)

we really cant do perfectly with the 200+ factors^^

It's a nice intellectual game, but futile, IMO, if anyone's trying to reverse engineer the algo and somehow "beat" it.

The top ten most important factors would be a good start!

Interesting exercise but ultimately not worth the time if you're doing it to try to figure out how to drive traffic. Spend your time making your site better not trying to reverse engineer an algorithm that changes daily. No offense but if you don't have a pretty good sense of the top 10 already you're either new to SEO or should be doing something else.

It does not matter how complex the algorithm is. One does not need to unravel the entire algorithm to rank high. Just knowing the basics gets reasonable results. I agree with John Harvey “The top ten most important factors would be a good start!”.

Comparable to human ingenuity the algorithm will be compromised if left unchanged. This is the primary reason why the algorithm is in constant flux to incorporate change.

I think people at large have their priorities wrong. Even if you were to decipher the entire algorithm and then create a website with that knowledge; I think you’ll soon learn that the most important variable/factor in maintaining good SERPs is your content and the user experience on your website.

You may fool the machines but you cannot fool the people, Search engines understand this. It is the bread and butter after all.

Good content with your users in mind and the aid of a social media campaign, and a strong offline marketing plan will give you “sustainable results”.

Google's objective is to get the best results and the best content. If you have a look at the factors, most of them are common sense and are about quality of the site. These factors can be used as a guideline to improve the quality of the sites...
I've made the exercise of summarizing all the factors found in the webmasterworld thread:
http://bit.ly/4H6ZSp

Seems like something you would do if you were totally bored. I don't believe I have ever been that bored. What good is the list when/if completed?

The more they are, the less I'm worried as each carry less weight. Instead, I stress on the most obvious ones that are the closest to the behavior of a natural web content writer for a natural web surfing experience.