SEOMoz created the first and second comprehensive search ranking factors document. We now have a new one, a shorter one, from HuoMah.com.
Dave lists out dozens and dozens of factors and adds commentary around them. Here are some of them, without the commentary:
- PageRank (or relative nodal link valuation)
- Link text (internal and external)
- Link relevance (global and page)
- Also see Temporal, Personalized PageRank and Phrase factors.
- Page TITLE tag
- Meta-description tag
- Document inception/age data
- Link velocity
- Link age
- Viral/Current news (QDF)
- Time of year (niche trends)
- Content update rate
- Domain history
- Inbound links (global)
- Outbound links
- Named entities (products, brand, author)
- Contact information (also important for geographic signals)
- Location of client device
- Location of webpage hosting
- Contact / location information
- Inbound/outbound link geo-factors
- Linguistic indicators (language and nuances)
- Heading (H1-5)
- Bold
- Italic
- Lists
- Font attributes (size, color)
- Related phrase ratios
- Categorization of content (clusters)
- Occurrences (probabilistic)
- Duplication dampening (filters)
- Personalization (phrase based)
- Link analysis (inbound)
- Global site relevance
- Term proximity (for multi-term queries)
- Image tagging (in content segment/related terms)
- Search History
- Web history (pages/sites we visit)
- Query revision (and analysis)
- Search intent (informational, navigational)
- Explicit data (favourites, reader,wiki)
- Interaction with advertising
- Surfing frequency/ time of day
- Personalized PageRank (yahoo and google)
- SERP and document interactions
- Duplicate issues (structural/content)
- Link devaluations (segmentation, link text, recips)
- Poor architecture/coding
- Reviewer penalties
- Redundant meta-data (such as meta-descriptions)
- Canonical / URL issues
- Server reliability (can be de-indexed)
- Phrase based detection
- Cloaking
- Boilerplate
- Domain history
- Query analysis
- Network proxy detection
- Link based (link spam and excessive recips)
- Client type (browser, mobile)
- Toolbars and browser (Google Suggest, web history)
- Application focus (email, instant messenger, RSS etc..)
Exhausting list, but it is nice to have an updated version in one place.
Forum discussion at Sphinn.
This article was written earlier this week and scheduled to go live April 15th.
