googles-ranking-factors-offsite

admin — Sun, 27 Dec 2009 02:58:49 +0000

This is a conclusion of Googles ranking factor – onsite – if you havnt already read it then its a recommended read. For anyone trying to get top positions in Google then its important that we understand the ranking factors. In this article I will be looking at Googles ranking factors for offsite SEO which is extremely important to ensure high rankings in Google. I will go through each area according to the its importance.

The quality of backlinks

Many people practising SEO look at the quantity of backlinks rather then the quality. Let me just mention that a quality backlink will work much more in your favour as opposed to 20 weak backlinks. The question is how do you determine a quality backlink to a weak one. Well im sure you guys have heard of page rank. We will come to this in a moment, even though Google is advising us not to pay close attention to the pagerank its very important to understand that the Page rank aspect of Google is one of the areas which really puts google ahead of other search engines. SO even though we have been advised not to pay alot of attention to this area its still help us in determining a websites trust and authority. So getting backlinks from trustworthy sites which have high page rank is what I call a quality link

The anchor text used

In the same way that a backlink is classed as a vote for your website, the anchor text used is classed as a vote for the keyword used. This is one of the main reasons why you can find adobe reader to be on the first spot of google for the keyword 'click here' However, it is important to vary your backlinks as if you are backlinking to your site using the same anchor text over and over again then this will not look natural and you can risk getting penalized. Just make everything look natural and you will see great results.

The importance of pagerank

Google has advised us not to focus on page rank and as a result they have removed this part from the webmasters account. There are many examples on google whereby low page rank domains are outranking high page rank domains in competitive niches. This tells us that page rank does not have a massive role for search engine results. However page rank still counts as to find out what authority the site has and will help when getting backlinks. A backlink from a high page rank domain will outweigh 20 backlink from a low page rank domain. The importance and weight of page rank has reduced however for the majority of searches performed you will still see the majority of high page rank domain dominating the serps.

The Topical relevance of inbound links

This is regarding the subject specific relevance relationship of the site linking to your target page. You will find many websites in the top pages of search engines that have backlinks with no relevance. However I can see this part becoming even more important in the future to come. What you must understand is that a backlink from a relevant site will give your website a higher Click Through Rate(CTR) which mentioned in another article is also important. What we must realize is that the anchor text will also make a backlink relevant so its not only about the actual subject specific relevance relationship.

Googles ranking factors – onsite

admin — Sun, 27 Dec 2009 02:56:40 +0000

About 90% of the searches on the internet are initiated through the search engines and about 80% of that is through Google. So its very important that we understand the ranking factors. Please dont quote me on the figures as many sources claim different amounts. The figures that I have used are average figures. In this article I will be talking about the onsite ranking factors in order of importance first

Website age

Website age is when your website first went live and was crawled by the search engines. Change of ownership can have an affect on this as Google and other search engines get notified when there is big change such as site ownership. Site age is a big ranking factor in Googles algorithm – They are trying there best to improve search engine results and the last thing they want is a fly by night site which hasnt earned its reputation to be there. Google still needs to figure out if the site is a spam site as it has no authority and no age. This factor will become even more important in the near future. Especially for new websites which are in high competitive niches

Websites historical performance

A websites history and statistics also play a very big role in Googles algorithm, such as a websites Click Through Rate (CTR), bounce rate, the number of social bookmarks, changes to servers and time spent on a site to name a few. Google collects this information through various tools that we opt in to use such as Google analytics and toolbars. This will have a much greater impact in the near future but its without a doubt that Google collects all of this information.

Internal linking popularity structure of a website

In the same way as backlinks coming from different c class ips using your anchor text to drive up your search engine rankings, there are a number of sites who have reached page 1 just through the internal linking structure. Use your anchor text links to link internally and build a good internal linking structure. I should also note that your website should have ease of navigation for both the user and the search engine. There are techniques such as the no follow rule which can be used to focus more attention on other pages. This is extremely handy for larger sites.

Top level domain (TLD) of site

The top level domain of a site is .com .co .uk .us .gov .info and so on.This is more important to country specific TLDs like .co.uk and .au

Load Time speed of site

Everyones heard about the new Google caffeine update and the new websites loadtime speed ranking factor. If you havnt already done so then read the article here – google caffeine. Now where not sure how important this will be but from looking at the way google is working more towards real time results and faster results, they are also wanting websites to open much more quicker as they feel this is important to the user. Google also has a LAB area in the webmasters account which will show you ways of speeding up your website. If you havent read the article on speed up your website with Gzip compression then Its a recommended read.

The HTML Validation of website

The HTML validation as according to W3C consortium. Even though this may not be a ranking factor its very important that your code is correct – if you forget to close a tag or open one then there might be much text that the search engine robots are missing. I can also see this becoming more important in the future due to user experience also.

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