Search Engine Ranking Factors Today & Tomorrow by SEOmom of SEOmoz #scbcn
1. State of SearchWhere We Are, Where We’re Headedand How to Win Gillian MuessigPresident & Co-Founder, SEOmoz
2. “Essentially, we've been doing the same kind of search now for over a decade, right? It's basically anchor text and PageRank and inbound links, and that's how we've kind of decided what page is best for a particular term… But there are signals beyond this.” Stefan Weitz, Director for Bing Search http://www.seomoz.org/blog/director-of-bing-discusses-holistic-search-and-clickstream-data-whiteboard-friday
3. “One piece of advice I give to SEO masters is, don’t chase after Google’s algorithm, chase after your best interpretation of what users want, because that’s what Google’s chasing after,” Matt Cutts, Head of Web Spam, Google http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/11/business/media/11search.html
4. Every 3-4 years, there's a big shift or addition to the key metrics Google (and, to a lesser extent MSN/Bing and Yahoo!) uses to order competitive search results. 1996-1999: On-page keyword usage + meta data 1999 - 2002: PageRank + On-page 2002 - 2005: Anchor text + Domain name + PageRank + On-Page 2005 - 2009: Domain authority + Diversity of linking domains + Topic modeling + Anchor text + Domain name + PageRank + On-Page Rand Fishkin, the Wizard of Moz http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/11/business/media/11search.html
7. Query Matching in Domain Name Contains All Query Terms in Domain Name Exact MatchHyphenated Domain Exact Match Domain http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-vs-bing-correlation-analysis-of-ranking-elements
8. Exact Match Domains by TLD Extension Exact Match .org Exact Match .net Exact Match .com Exact Match http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-vs-bing-correlation-analysis-of-ranking-elements
9. Keywords in Domain All Keywords inSubdomain Exact Match .* http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-vs-bing-correlation-analysis-of-ranking-elements
10. On Page Keyword Usage KWs in Body KWs in Alt Attribute KWs in H1 Tag KWs in URL KWs in Title http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-vs-bing-correlation-analysis-of-ranking-elements
12. Length of Domain, URL & Content Content Length(tokens in body) URL Length(chars) Domain NameLength (chars) http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-vs-bing-correlation-analysis-of-ranking-elements
13. Website Home Pages Exact Match Domain Home Page of Site http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-vs-bing-correlation-analysis-of-ranking-elements
14. Features w/Highest Correlation Number of Links Exact Match Domain # of LinkingRoot Domains Domains Linkingw/Exact Match Exact Match.com Domains http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-vs-bing-correlation-analysis-of-ranking-elements
16. Diversity of Domains + Linking C-Blocks # of Linking Root Domains to URL # of Links to URL http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-vs-bing-correlation-analysis-of-ranking-elements
17. Anchor Text # of Links w/ exact match anchor text # of linking root domains w/ exact match anchor text http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/11/business/media/11search.html
18. Features of Linking Pages http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html Data via http://www.opensiteexplorer.org
19. Features of Linking Domains http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html Data via http://www.opensiteexplorer.org
21. Topic Modeling Topic models provide a simple way to analyze large volumes of unlabeled text.
22. Topic Modeling A "topic" consists of a cluster of words that frequently occur together. http://neoformix.com/archive.html
23. Using contextual clues, topic models can connect words with similar meanings and distinguish between uses of words with multiple meanings. http://www.stanford.edu/~kaisa/research.html
35. Causation? Not So Fast! Perhaps, good links are more likely to point to pages that are more "relevant" via a topic model or some other aspect of Google's algorithm that we don't yet understand naturally biases towards these.
41. We have built a tool to help grade & improve page content
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43. Social Signals Page A 646 links from 36 root domains 2 tweets Page B 1 link from 1 root domain 522 tweets http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-do-tweets-influence-search-rankings-an-experiment-for-a-cause
44. Social Signals Page B – the tweeted version – ranks #1! Page A 646 links from 36 root domains 2 tweets Page B 1 link from 1 root domain 522 tweets http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-do-tweets-influence-search-rankings-an-experiment-for-a-cause
47. Author Authority Danny Sullivan: Do you try to calculate the authority of someone who tweets that might be assigned to their Twitter page. Do you try to “know,” if you will, who they are? Bing: Yes. We do calculate the authority of someone who tweets. For known public figures or publishers, we do associate them with who they are. (For example, query for Danny Sullivan) Google: Yes we do compute and use author quality. We don’t know who anyone is in real life :-) http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html http://searchengineland.com/what-social-signals-do-google-bing-really-count-55389
61. Ignore the offline worldhttp:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-next-generation-of-ranking-signals
62. Domain Name / Brand Name “Mentions” http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html http://www.seomoz.org/labs/blogscape
63. Depreciation/Filtering of Anchor Text http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html http://www.seomoz.org/blog/a-recommendation-for-googles-webspam-team
66. Building Your Own Social Community http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html http://mashable.com/2010/11/15/biggest-facebook-brands/
69. Competitive Analysis of Top “Brands” Where do these brands earn their links? http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html http://www.opensiteexplorer.org