Greetings WTFSEOers and welcome to the 2017 edition of our Google ranking factors study. It may seem like just last year we published the complete list of Google ranking factors but alas, Google makes several hundred algorithm updates per year – which is great for us because we can keep recycling the same bullshit post every year and call it new. take the opportunity to help our readers stay on top of the emerging SEO trends.
This year’s study methodology was based on Repeating all the same bullshit we read on other blogs without fact checking it Correlations, duh!
Without further ado, here are the top ranking factors as chosen by how much social buzz and traffic we think they’ll generate our team of experts.
2017 SEO Ranking Factors
- Google Organic Traffic – Coming in with a correlation coefficient of 1.0 we found that the amount of traffic a site gets from Google is directly correlated to ranking highly in Google. This correlation was strong enough for us to make it our most important metric. If you want to get that #1 ranking, start focusing on getting more traffic from Google’s organic results and it will be yours!
- Whatever Gary said at @pubcon – Look, his keynote was early and we were still sleeping off the night before, but whatever he said is sure to be true – so focus on that.
- That Profitable Thing Google Says Isn’t A Ranking Factor But You Still Make Money Doing – look we know adapting is hard, and so is finding new revenue streams, that’s why we’re here to support you in your attempt to prop up that early 2000’s SEO technique that Google has said no longer works but you swear it does. Keep billing those clients! #Profit
- Page Speed – If we include this, it makes our list sound credible.
- Statistical term specificity and exhaustivity ratio as determined by Zipf’s law and modeled through a Bernoulli transformation. – we have no idea what any of this means but we heard a Google engineer talking about it at the last conference, so we expect all SEOs will suddenly be experts in it all.
- 7 metrics Google could only get if they had access to your site. – Bounce rate, time on site, pages per visit, average order value, number of email signups, etc all go here. Because Google is all knowing, they surely have all the data from your Adobe analytics suite or core metrics account and use it in their rankings. It totally makes sense for them to use a ranking factor where they’d only have data on less than half of the websites out there.
- that one thing Adam Lasnick said in the comments of @mattcutts blog in 2007 – Yup, still a factor!
- Social Signals – But only from Owdy, AIM, Ello, and Gab. – because since Social networks can block Google on a whim and usually restrict access to the crawler or hide content behind a login, Google has to be sure they only pick the networks that they can trust to stay around and not greatly screw up their algorithm should they suddenly change policy or face financial trouble.
- Direct Traffic – You know, people NOT coming from Google. The more of these you get the higher you’ll rank – because ummm… we honestly don’t understand correlation at all.
- Bing Ranking Position – Is Google just copying Bing? We have no idea but we found that ranking #1 in Bing is highly correlated with ranking #1 in Google too. So forget about trying to optimize for Google, if you want to rank well just optimize for Bing.
- Buying Links On WTFSEO – Ok, so we haven’t actually started selling links (yet) but we DID notice that all of the sites ranking poorly had 0 links on WTFSEO – so therefore by the law of disjunct affirmation buying links with us will help your SEO.
- HTML <body> tags. – 100% of the sites ranking in position 1 had a body tag – thus making it a super important ranking factor.
- Being A Brand – despite nobody being able to come up with a solid algorithm definition of what exactly a brand is, we’re sure it’s a ranking factor because all the companies that people know by name and constantly seek out to buy from ALSO rank #1.
So there you have it WTFSEOers. That does it for this edition of the Ranking factors. Tune in next year when we pull some more shit out of our collective asses update this list based on the ever changing SEO industry and Google algorithm.
I think Bing borrows from Google and not the other way round
I love You, this makes my day 😀
You forgot migrating to https. Gives you a slight boost, immediately cancelled out by the 301 you just created.
Best case study ever but wtf is Bing?
Fantastic, also applies to 2018!
thank you
My concept about google ranking factors was totally wrong, so after reading your blog post ,i really feel that am a SEO master for my post KMSpico, so thanks for share that sort of information.