We sent out a survey to a bunch of people in the industry we’ve either had a drink with at a conference, or that have appeared on an Experts list, to determine once and for all what the Google Ranking Factors actually are.
The results won’t surprise you, as the majority of respondents have simply based their responses on our 2013 Google Ranking Factors study, because they don’t want to appear to not know what they’re talking about. There will also be some responses from those who’ve figured something out, but don’t want to share it, so they obfuscate their answers to hide their real findings for as long as possible. There’ll also be some real answers from people with true insights that have tested and proven what does and what doesn’t work. Unfortunately they’ll be such a small percentage of the results that their influence will be drowned out by the rest.
So without further ado here are the Definitive Google Ranking Factors
- The same as last year’s, but with a surprisingly slightly higher percentage
- The same as in 2013, with the same percentage
- Last year’s number 4
- Last year’s number 3
- That thing Matt Cutts, John Mueller, and 3 other Google reps have repeatedly said is NOT a ranking factor.
- A recent buzzword that one leading industry expert wrote about in an article, despite Google saying that they don’t take that into account
- Everything else tied for 7th with such minute percentages that there’s really no way to differentiate between them
- HTTPS
- Latent Semantic Indexing
- Word Targeted Funnel Semantic Eigenvector Ordinance
