Sphinn - Will It Float? A Guide To Google Ranking Factors

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Will It Float? A Guide To Google Ranking Factors

Went Hot: July 15, 2008 - 8:02 pm
Posted By: DazzlinDonna 355 days ago
Topic Type: News Story (Jump to http://www.seopscentre.com)
Category: Google SEO

This list is by no means exhaustive and there are hundreds of other factors that advanced SEO practioners will point to as having an effect on search engine placements. What you see here are simply the primary factors that should be taken into account when trying to optimize a website for higher rankings. Once these are taken care of you can move your focus into more complex areas to really push your rankings higher.

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from ZakNicola 355 days ago #

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For such a good article I don't understand why this isn't getting more sphinns.

from Halfdeck 355 days ago #

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"It’s unlikely to hurt you if you don’t bother to include a Keywords META Tag, but as long as you don’t go over the top and only include words that are actually relevant, it won’t hurt to put it in either."

Actually I've seen a Googler or two point to overloaded META keywords as a negative quality signal.

"will increase your site’s “TrustRank”"

It's questionable Google uses TrustRank at all, though I believe "trust" is still important. However, that has nada to do with domain age or its behavior in the past - it has everything to do with the character of a webmaster and his past "criminal" record.

That said, a well-written, engaging post.

from KenJones 355 days ago #

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@Halfdeck - "Actually I've seen a Googler or two point to overloaded META keywords as a negative quality signal."

That's exactly the point I wanted to get across. Going over the top with your META Keywords can "sink" you with Google, but the tag has been so devalued as a result of all the spammy abuses in the past that even a properly written keywords tag isn't going to help you "float" much higher.

That said, perhaps I could have made that point clearer in the original post.

"It's questionable Google uses TrustRank at all, though I believe "trust" is still important."

I think we can both agree that (whether or not "TrustRank TM" exists within Google as a documented part of the overall ranking algorithm in the same way as PageRank does) Google does make use of certain signals regarding a site's "trustworthiness."
Ann Smarty did a great post today about the value of domain age/website age (sphinn link here http://sphinn.com/story/59098 ) which shows that the age of a website (and the age of its associated link profile) can be a stronger influencer that the actual domain age. IMO these kind of signals almost certainly form a subset of the signals used to calculate PageRank.
It's a shame I didn't see her post until after I published mine or I'd have included a link to it.

I'm not sure I follow your logic as far as this having to do with the webmaster and his/her record. Webmasters may come and go from a site and although a previous webmaster's indiscretions may have caused the negative effects to a site's rankings, it is still the site that suffers such penalties and it's up to the new webmaster to clean up any issues and file for reinclusion.

from Halfdeck 354 days ago #

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"Ann Smarty did a great post today about the value of domain age"

That's an interesting post. Google has hundreds of quality signals at its disposal, so its hard to overlook anything. Trust, however, has to do more with webmaster behavior than signals of quality. An authoritative aged domain may make its content more valuable in the SERPs but Google will not necessarily trust some or all of its outlinks (e.g. SER) if it has a history of link selling. Do you trust a guy just because he's 70 years old and has a solid reputation? We got plenty of people that fit that profile in the government getting away with murder.

"Webmasters may come and go from a site"

That's certainly true. Nevertheless, who owns a domain often comes into play when judging intentions. One example is Matt Cutts often examining a site owner's entire collection of domains before jumping into a site review, even when (as John Andrews highlighted in one of his posts) the domains don't cross link at all. Why does he do it? To get a feeling for what kind of webmaster he's dealing with.

When David Airey got penalized one of the main issues that Matt Cutts and Danny Sullivan brought up is David's knowledge of SEO - which solidified Matt's suspicion that David's contest was intent on gaming Google.

Another example is the recent widget-penalty discussed on SEOmoz where Google not only penalized the original site but warned the site owner against running the same "scam" on their second site.

How much of this is hard wired into Google's algorithms? Who knows. But we all know "intention" is a big word for Google - and the bottom line is it isn't always easy to judge intent without sizing up the man holding the gun (he could be a cop trying to take down a bank robber or he could be out to rob a grocery store; just the fact he's holding a gun tells you nothing).