The History Of Four Ranking Factors

Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Friday, April 10, 2009 Comments (12)

Rand Fishkin at SEOmoz continues to offer insightful commentary. He’s got a graph that he’s put together showing what he thinks are some of the most important ranking factors the search engines use to rank websites. I agree with it for the most part, but there is one aspect of it that I slightly disagree with.

First, before I go into that I’d like to show you the graph:

I do believe that Rand is right on with the trust/authority of host domain. And he’s pretty much right on with the importance of anchor text. That metric saw its hey-day in the years before the Vince update. I also agree with the rapid decline in link juice. What is a little bit murkier is the “moderate” grade he gives to on-page keyword management.

I suppose if you are just talking about keyword usage then moderate might be the right grade. But on-page search engine optimization factors all around are much more important than simply moderate. And that includes keyword usage. I’d say that on-page SEO in general should be up along the powerful mark, right alongside the anchor text line. But I’d say that line has pretty much been a flat line, maybe a slight decline from the years before the Vince update, but that’s only because internal navigation has probably seen a bigger rise in importance while raw keyword usage has diminished in importance. I don’t know if Rand would agree with that, but that’s how I see it.

I see the trust and authority of your host domain becoming more important in the future. But how that is measured will change over time. Currently, it seems that Google places high importance on quality and quantity of traffic in addition to authority of inbound links. Where we will be on that in five or ten years remains to be seen, but that’s how I see it today.

What about you? Do you agree or disagree with Rand’s analysis? How about ours?

Comments (12) Category: Search Engines

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12 Comments

Comment by Hicham

Made Friday, 10 of April , 2009 at 7:20 pm

I read Rand’s article and agree with what he mentioned; to sum up, the factors implemented together help a lot however I do still see the importance of ‘anchor text’ yet it’s not dominat as he mentioned.

Comment by Nick Stamoulis

Made Saturday, 11 of April , 2009 at 6:24 am

@Hicham – Thanks for reading, anchor text used to be a big factor but not so much these days…

Comment by Hicham

Made Sunday, 12 of April , 2009 at 8:32 am

You are welcome. Yup I do agree as this is the new trend lately.

Comment by Nick Stamoulis

Made Sunday, 12 of April , 2009 at 7:09 pm

@Hicham – It should be interesting to see how the search engine ranking factors will change/evolve over the coming years…

Comment by Si Sloman

Made Monday, 13 of April , 2009 at 3:31 pm

Interesting perspective. For me, the value in creating common measures for SEO and SEM would be to see how a particular website ranks against competitor websites…how to tell how effective our SEO is. Is that possible now?

Comment by Nick Stamoulis

Made Monday, 13 of April , 2009 at 4:15 pm

@Si Sloman – Thanks for reading…I tend to look at the competition but not let it really control every aspect of the SEO/SEM campaign. The true measurement is how many visitors, business/sales you are getting of our each medium.

Comment by Shailendra Dubey

Made Wednesday, 15 of April , 2009 at 4:26 am

Thanks Nick, for such a nice information. Keep posting

Comment by Nick Stamoulis

Made Wednesday, 15 of April , 2009 at 5:56 am

@Shailendra Dubey – Thanks I will for sure )

Comment by dave

Made Wednesday, 6 of May , 2009 at 11:14 am

Qt from an SEO num-skull!!! What is the ” trust/authority of the host domain” and what makes for higher ranking for this category? I understand the rest of the factors mentioned. I understand Google gives higher quality ratings to older sites over new ones. I was told they like sites that have URL’s reserved for two or more years because spammers typically only purchase a domain name for one year.

So what else do you do to become more “trustworthy?”

Comment by Nick Stamoulis

Made Wednesday, 6 of May , 2009 at 12:32 pm

@dave – Thanks for reading and your question!

I would say to build “trust factor” this would be to build your business, website and brand online over time through the following ways: online pr, article marketing, blogging, social networking, video marketing, industry association participation, etc. All of these things will help build your company and will help position your business as a leader in your industry. I hope this helps!

Comment by Chris Lang

Made Wednesday, 6 of May , 2009 at 3:11 pm

What I would like to know, is what you all think determines trust / authority. I know what I think Google is looking for. However what do you guys, less close to the flame I fly around think?

Comment by Nick Stamoulis

Made Wednesday, 6 of May , 2009 at 4:25 pm

@Chris Lang – Thanks Chris

Here is another article I just published about Google Trust Factor:

http://knol.google.com/k/nick-stamoulis/google-trust-factor-the-new-frontier-of/2etaozo5qdxkf/2#