Apologies for the long delay, but the search ranking factors article is now complete. Thanks to everyone who contributed; it's quite an impressive display of how much knowledge and experience professional SEOs can share when they get together on a project.
There are now two formats, one where all of the comments left by the contributors are visible and another where they are hidden (to make it slightly easier to read). The formatting of the document could still use some work, so I'll be experimenting to see if I can make a printable version for those who'd prefer to read it on a plane or at home in bed.
My favorite part of this project has to be the statistics that come from everyone's voting contributions. Here's just a few of the more interesting pieces of data:
- Only "Title Tags" had an average score equivalent to a 5/5.
- The average score in total was under 2.5 - suggesting that there are more unimportant factors than important ones.
- The average standard deviation was 1.02 exactly, showing that the 13 voters (myself included) had generally simliar ideas about the importance of the various factors.
- The standard deviation of all standard deviations in the study was only 0.23 - an indication that variance did not fluctuate much between items. We generally disagreed on each factor equally.
- There are 103 factors and Dan Thies left comments on 47 of them... Although, to be fair, one of his comments was "jibba jabba" :)
The comments themselves are remarkably insightful. I can't thank my contributors enough. Reading through them, it feels like I'm getting the best of every forum discussion in snippet form - easy to digest, often humorous and generally thoughtful.
Note to Contributors: If there's a comment you'd like to modify (typos, cut-offs, etc.), please let me know. The transcribing may not have been perfect.
Hi Randfish, I have a question for you that how this domain ( https://www.ingidesign.com/) is booked by me for one of my client on 2005-10-26. It's amazing that this website is getting Googel PR 7. I have checked the link back and found google.com is representing 2,300 link back but when I go to see the link back of this webiste on those pages I can't find any information about the domain. Can you explain how this website is getting this much hight rank.
WTH, aman? Why are you leaving that here? Of all the sites to spam, you should know better than to link drop here.
Let's check out your link network (but not before mentioning that your link is dropped improperly so it can't be clicked on and that your site is all in flash, so there's no chance search engines can index your content)
sycamore.in - 9 links, 4 unique domains, 2 from forum profiles and 1 from a client... so at least you haven't been spamming long...
Wow - you share an IP address with 50,000 other sites, though...
mentor - it's re-directing somewhere. If it's showing you PR7, that's probably a PR hijacking, the actual site itself has no links at all - Note that none of the links Google is showing for it actually point to it - it's just "assuming" the PR of another domain by using re-direction tricks.
Nice site though, it looks a lot like this one: https://www.templatemonster.com...
:)
Thanks PP - Now we know you're a spammer. Just for good measure, your IP is: 86.128.107.251 in case anyone wants to know...
Apologies if it’s causing any inconvenience!
Step one : make your site Google friendly
Avoid webhosts that park your domain on link farms while you build content Example ? Any domain found on searches like parked free GoDaddy. While there has not been to my knowledge any official word from Google about such pages, a widespread feeling is that these link farms are your best bet for a Google quarantine. Make sure you chose the right host. I’ll recommend yahoo.
Build a few pages before submitting your site to Google Before asking for inclusion (Add your URL to Google) be sure to build a few pages. Again, it’s pure speculation, but word is that Google doesn’t like empty domains, and brand new domains with dozens of pages already (which may look like suspicious spam content). I’ve submitted my domain to Google once I had written about 10 pages.
Use Google’s Sitemap Google has introduced a simple XML sitemap file protocol for better crawling and indexing. Create one for your site. If you are a happy Wordpress user, this is a painless breeze : the Google Sitemap Generator creates and updates your sitemap everytime you write a post, and then notifies Google about it
Step 2 : get some links pointing at you In order to get better positionning in search result pages, you need to gain “authority”, which looks like PageRank from a Google’s point of view. To do so, you need to get a few incoming links.
added by https://sycamore.in
Well this is fantastic. I am one of the most frustated search engine searcher who knows all the searching parameters of the search engines. But I never get the desired results i want. When i think about the innocent users who dont know about the searching commands, How does they react!!!!!!!. This is my tiny effort to remove the spammers from this earth. For that i am planning to launch a site i need you guys help and some commnet over https://www.theseoguru.comhere also. Vikas Amrohi......
Genius, truely genius.
That is just beautiful. So very helpful to those who are just diving into this world of SEO (me!).
Thanks a million!
Great article Rand. One question: What is Stemming and Plurality Evaluation? I understand that this relates to plural words but could you elaborate a little in case i have missed anything.
Rand:
It just struck me. I think you forgot to mention size of the document/# of pages indexed....or am I missing that. EDIT: Ah # of hosted documents. Excuse me. So many points to digest.
This is a terrrific article and comments from the contributors adds further depth and insights.
Dave
Rand - this list is just awesome. Hope you dont mind - I'm melding it with my own...
I recommend it to all those poor souls out there that I turn down for SEO help - they've gotta start somewhere right?
You should revisit it every year (or 6 months) or so. This is GOLD, Rand, GOLD!
One thing I always add:
It is important to note that although SEO is extremely important, usability should always come first. The end goal is to get visitors to the site and keep them happy while they are there. Never compromise your content’s user-friendliness or the integrity of your text for better SEO.
Much of this information is assumable, but it is great to hear it directly from a search engine. Excellent
Excellent piece of work, Rand! I'm just speechless! :)