SEO Ranking Factors in 2010

Reasonable Surfers, Tweets, On-Page & More

Random Surfer vs. Reasonable Surfer
PageRank: The Random Surfer Model

www.seomoz.org/blog/how-pagerank-works-why-the-original-pr-formula-
may-be-flawed
User & Feature Data: Reasonable Surfer
• Font size of anchor text associated with the link;
• The position of the link
• Position of the link in the list;
• Font color and/or other attributes of the link
• Number of words in anchor text of a link;
• Actual words in the anchor text of a link;
• How commercial the anchor text might be;
• Type of link (e.g., text link, image link);

• Image link aspect ratio

• The context of a few words before and/or after the link;
• A topical cluster with which the anchor text of the link is associated;
• Whether the link leads somewhere on the same host or domain;

www.seobythesea.com/?p=3806
Confirmed: Link Position Matters

Testing shows this link passes

more value than this link, which
passes more than this link, etc.
 Takeaway: Links in Content May Be
Considerably More Valuable

Not here

Get a link here

Twitter Data Influencing the SERPs
October 2009: No Correlation / Value to
Rankings Models
End of October: Bing & Google Make
Data Deals with Twitter
Today: Tweets Appear to Influence QDF

twittersphere.com
 Are They Treated Like Links?

Tweetmeme.com
What About Facebook’s Social Graph?
Does it Have Enough Adoption to Be
Useful?

www.allfacebook.com/2010/04/50000-websites-add-facebooks-like-button-
and-social-plugins-in-first-week/
 What Percent of Sites Use It?

Facebook Sites: 50,000 / Root Domains: 85,725,739 = 0.06%

www.seomoz.org/blog/canonical-url-tags-nofollows-linkscape-update
Is the Data Flowing to Google?
Could this be Bing’s Secret Weapon?

www.mediapost.com/publications/?art_aid=122015&fa=Articles.showArticle
Will Facebook Build their Own Engine?

news.google.com/news?q=seomoz&scoring=n
On-Page Correlations
Keyword Position in the Title Element

www.seomoz.org/blog/perfecting-keyword-targeting-on-page-optimization
H1s: Did They Ever Matter (Much)?

www.seomoz.org/blog/googles-algorithm-pretty-charts-math-stuff
Alt Attributes: Potentially Useful

www.seomoz.org/blog/googles-algorithm-pretty-charts-math-stuff
KW Density: Correlation ≠ Causation

www.miislita.com/fractals/keyword-density-optimization.html
Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA)
Topic Modeling that Looks Promising

www.cs.princeton.edu/~blei/papers/BleiNgJordan2003.pdf
 Goal: Get “Recommended” Terms &
Phrases to Employ to Bolster Relevancy

Google’s Wonder Wheel (available under “more search tools”)

 Q+A
Rand Fishkin, CEO & Co-Founder, SEOmoz

• Twitter: @randfish
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• Blog: www.seomoz.org/blog Anything!
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• Email: rand@seomoz.org