Google's John Mueller said that Google is trying to move away from the over 200 ranking signal number because they find it to be "kind of misleading." Misleading in that it is hard to quantify the number of ranking signals Google uses.
John Mueller said this when he was asked to rank the top signals of the 200+ signals. At the 49:49 mark into the video, John was asked "Among all of the 200 ranking signals, which are the most important?"
John replied "I don't like to rank ranking signals so I can't give you an answer there."
He then added "the other small thing there is we've kind of moved away from the over 200 ranking signals number because it feels like even having a number like that is is kind of misleading. In the sense that, Google has a spreadsheet with all of the ranking signals and they can just sort them by importance and tell me which ones they are and that's definitely not the case like a lot of these things just take into account so many different things you can't just isolate them out," John added.
So you probably won't be hearing from Google's about the number of ranking signals the search company uses to rank documents in search anymore.
Here is the video embed where he said this:
Forum discussion at YouTube Community.
