With the help of some friends from SEOChat, I've compiled a list of 93 metrics that may play large or small roles in determining how search engines rank documents in a query. This list is by no means comprehensive, but it does offer a great deal of information about each factor, as well as a relative measure of each factor's perceived importance.
I'm open to debate on the topic and would love to be reminded of the few dozen notable metrics I've almost certainly missed. Your input is greatly appreciated.
Dan,
No worries - quibble away. Also, the images were gone for a few hours, but they're back now. Sorry about that. They will also now print out, as before printers didn't recognize them...
Did you consider quantity of pages in a site to be a metric?
Rand,
I'll be blogging about this over at SitePoint later, but before I do... I'm not sure if there's supposed to be some visual cue as to the level of importance you've assigned to a factor, but if there is I can't see it in Firefox at all. Don't make me fire up IE to check.
You may want to add another column, indicating whether we have some actual factual confirmation that a factor is in play somewhere (like page titles or anchor text) or whether we're just guessing (like w3c validation).
I'm giving you a pass on liberal use of the term "link popularity" because we don't have generally accepted terms for most of the things I'd want to quibble about. :D
A lot of people have commented on this article - very exciting stuff. I'm implementing some changes based on your (the communities) comments, but I'd also like to expand this a bit.
I'll have more on this subject, soon... Thanks for all your help, everyone and keep your comments and criticisms coming.
If a person uses these factors as a guide to planning and building a website they should have a very powerful property. Nobody knows exactly what the search engines use to rank a site but all of the items listed could be used and just make good sense to apply them.
It is a nice list, but some of the allegded metrics are without any merit or justification. Also the use of the abriviation "TLD" is confusing. TLD is often refered to the final portion of a domain name, and to the highest level of the domain name hierarchy. The Top Level Domains include namespaces such as ".com", ".org", ".net", and other well-known categories.