Академический Документы
Профессиональный Документы
Культура Документы
1. User-Friendly URLs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
2. Parameter Control . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
3. Quality of Supplemental Content . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
4. Real World Business Information. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
5. Robots Control . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
6. Link Velocity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
7. Sitemaps . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
8. Linking Out to High-Quality Sources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
9. Site Architecture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
10. Pagination . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
11. Domain Age . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
12. Website & Business Reputation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
13. Use of Semantic Content . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
14. Domain Extension . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
15. Server Location . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
16. Multiple Sources of Traffic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
17. Readability . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
18. Factually Correct . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
19. Author Reputation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
20. Accurate & Consistent Registration Info. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
1. Spam . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
2. Manipulative Links . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
3. Thin Content . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
4. Non-unique Content . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
5. Cloaking . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
6. Meta Noindex Errors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
7. Canonical Errors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
8. Robots.txt Blocking . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
9. Keyword Stuffing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
10. Hidden Text or Links . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
11. Piracy / DMCA Notices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
12. Rich Snippet Spam . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
13. Blocking Important JS / CSS Files . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
14. Overly Long / Complex URLs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
15. Linking to Bad Neighborhoods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
16. Slow Speed . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
17. Aggressive Ads / Intrusive Interstitials . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
18. Over-Optimized Anchor Text . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
19. High Quantity of Crawl Errors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
20. False / Misleading / Offensive . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
21. Porn / Explicit Content . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
22. Redirect Chains . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
23. UGC Spam . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
24. Sneaky Redirects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
25. Bad Domain History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
… we’ve aggregated the most popular SEO Success Factors in one place. Our
goal is to show you not only what works, but how to use these factors to
improve your rankings and traffic.
Use this information is to prioritize the most critical factors first, while
working your way towards less important elements. You can safely ignore the
“Myth” factors, while being sure to stay away from the “Negative Factors.”
Critical Factors
Sites at the top of Google search results typically score well in most, if not all,
of these critical seo success factors.
To make this happen, you need data on what users are searching. This is why
almost all SEO starts with Keyword Research.
Once you know what terms are worth pursuing, you can create content that
targets those topics. We’ll cover this in later success factors.
How to Leverage:
There are 100s of guides on getting started with keyword research.
A few of the best include:
• Keywords and Keyword Research
• How to Do Keyword Research
• Keyword Research for SEO: The Definitive Guide
How to Leverage:
Most Technical SEO Audits cover crawling and search engine accessibility
as priority #1. One of the best resources is Benjamin’s Estes’ Technical SEO
Audit Checklist for Human Beings and Annielytics Site Audit Checklist.
These include:
• The Authority + Trust of the Link
• The relevance of the Link
• Anchor Text
• … and Many More
How to Leverage:
If you want to rank, you need good links—from both inside and outside of your
site. For external linking strategies, we highly recommend the resources at Point
Blank SEO, in particular, Link Building Strategies — The Complete List. For
insight into internal linking, check out the linking resources at Hobo Web.
But now, perhaps one of the biggest questions of all: Does this content satisfy
user’s intent?
It’s not enough to target your content with keywords and phrases (more on
this later). The important question Google wants to know is “does the content
give the user the most satisfying answer they are looking for?”
Google doesn’t want to simply deliver answers to users; they want to
deliver the best answers and experiences, ones that satisfy user intent without
requiring additional searches.
SEOs refer to this in different ways: dwell time, the long click, return-to-
SERP, and more. In essence, they all mean this: Does the user find the most
satisfying answer to what they are looking for without searching further?
If the user has to click the back button, modify their search, or spend more
time with results from other websites, this may be a sign that your content
doesn’t deliver the best experience.
How to Leverage:
Delivering content that satisfies user intent is one of the most challenging
aspects of SEO, in part because it’s difficult to measure.
That said, there are a number of practices that can improve your
chances significantly.
1. Deliver content with the format and features Google expects. E.g., if the top
ranking sites for your keyword in Google all contain video results, it’s a good
indication that users (and Google) are looking for videos to satisfy intent
2. Answer the query as completely as possible, giving the user zero excuses to
hit the back button. A good way to do this is to incorporate the answers to
additional questions, i.e. “people also ask” into your content.
3. Measure and work to improve your engagement rates, including:
• Bounce Rate
• Time on Site
• Pages per Visit
• Goal Conversion Rate
Rand Fishkin has covered the topic of user satisfaction in depth. For
better understanding, check out his articles:
• Is the New, Most Powerful Ranking Factor “Searcher Task Accomplishment?”
• How to Beat Your Competitor’s Rankings with More *Comprehensive*
Content
5 . Uniqueness of Content
If your content is exactly the same as multiple other copies on the web, why
should Google rank it above all the others?
Put another way—if your content isn’t uniquely valuable, it doesn’t mean
Google will necessarily punish you for it, but it does make it much, much harder
to rise to the top.
Duplicate content issues generally take two forms. First is content that actually
copies content from another site or page. The second is caused by duplicates of
your own content when 2 or more URLs create the same (or very close) content.
In theory, both of these URLs may create the exact same page. Not only does
Google need to crawl each one (which could waste precious crawl budget) but
the two pages may split link equity and other ranking signals. This makes it very
difficult for Google to decide which page—if any at all—to show in search results.
How to Leverage:
1. Make sure your content, including all text, offers unique value from all other
sites and pages across the internet.
2. Control duplicate content on your own site. Tools and techniques include
canonical tags, parameter handling, robots.txt, redirects, and more. These
guides should help:
• Duplicate Content (Search Console Help)
• Duplicate Content Advice from Hobo Web
• Duplicate Content Best Practices
How to Leverage:
A good place to start is Google’s own published Panda questions, which
many assume form the basis of their machine learning model.
Since you likely don’t have an army of Search Quality Raters at your dis-
posal, Distilled created a helpful Panda Survey that you can use with your
own test group.
7 . Freshness
Does fresh equal success?
Since the early days, Google has filed patent after patent on evaluating con-
tent freshness for its search results. This typically involves two parts.
First, Google devised a system known as “Query Deserves Freshness” to
determine the types of search terms that most benefit from fresh results.
Examples include:
• News and current events – “Seattle protest” “Grammy Awards”
• Recurring events – “Full moon” “World Cup Schedule”
• Frequently Updated – “iPhone Specs” “Mac Reviews”
• Topics with a recent spike in search volume or social media coverage
Other systems determine how fresh and relevant your content is for
the search query. Signals which may indicate fresh content include:
• Age of the content
• Updates to the content, including which sections were updated (important or
unimportant) and how much content was updated
• How frequently your content is updated
• How often people link to your content (lower link frequency may indicate
content that has grown stale)
• Changes in engagement metrics (worsening engagement may mean content is
out of date)
Fresh content isn’t always better, but the idea is to deliver the most relevant
content.
How to Leverage:
Updating your content for the sake of freshness isn’t necessary, but keeping
your content relevant and up-to-date is.
Updating old content is also a way to earn new links and fresh
engagement. A couple of resources to help:
1. 10 Illustrations of How Fresh Content May Influence Google Rankings
2. Evergreen Content: How Updating An Old Post Boosted Pageviews by 468%
The truth is that when you improve your CTR, you get more traffic.
Period.
There are potential downstream benefits as well. A higher CTR means more
people are looking at your content, which means more potential shares, more
potential links, and more potential opportunities for engagement. All of
these may have a positive influence on your Google rankings, either directly
or indirectly.
How to Leverage:
Fortunately, influencing CTR is one of the areas you have the most control over
as an SEO. That is, at least you have the opportunity to experiment!
The three main tools you have to help raise CTR are:
1. Title Tags
2. Meta Description
3. Rich Snippets
The good news is that all of these are under your direct control, at least par-
tially. Google may choose to display your information however they want in
search results, but you can greatly influence this with your copy and structured
data markup.
Optimizing for Featured Snippets is another option, which we’ll cover in the
next section.
9 . Speed
Fast is in.
Speed is a confirmed ranking factor. When Google first announced it in 2010,
they said it only applied to a small number of slow-loading pages.
Since then, multiple studies have shown a significant correlation between
speed and rankings across all sites, not only the slow ones.
Additionally, Google announced site speed as a ranking factor for mobile
results.
How to Leverage:
For many, improving your page speed can be a technically challenging experi-
ence. Plus, there are so many factors (time to first byte, waterfalls, download
time, etc.) it can be difficult to know what to optimize for.
Fortunately, Lighthouse is a free tool that both Google and the SEO commu-
nity have rallied around. Its Performance Audit scores your page speed into a
single metric and breaks it down into actionable steps.
Another easy option for improving speed is utilizing a Content Delivery
Network (CDN) which can speed up delivery of images and files to your users.
Cloudflare offers a highly recommended starter plan which is both free and easy.
How to Leverage:
Put simply: at a minimum, you should have a mobile-friendly site. Most modern
platforms today do this by default with ease, but some older and many custom
Content Management Systems may struggle.
Additionally, with Google’s Mobile First Index, you should make sure your
mobile site doesn’t strip out important content. Here’s a tool from Russ Jones
that can tell if your mobile site is stripping out any links (beta): http://www.
thegooglecache.com/mobile-links.php
Additional resources:
• Google’s Mobile SEO Guide
• Mobile SEO: The Definite Guide
• Mobile-Friendly Test
Feel free to use this infographic with proper attribution. Click here for high-res version.
Important Factors
Not only are the following factors important, but combined, they are hugely
important. It’s possible not every factor will apply to your site, but the vast
majority will have a big influence your rankings and visibility.
How to Leverage:
While there no single “right” way to design and organize a page, a
handful of guidelines go a long way in helping to get your message
across, and to rank.
1. Clear navigation
2. Prominent main content – typically above the fold
3. Helpful supplemental content
4. Clean UX and design
5. Non-aggressive ads
6. Legible Text (at least 16px)
6. Body text
7. Image alt attributes (when appropriate)
8. Metadata
How to Leverage:
1. Use on-page SEO best practices to target your content towards specific
phrases and topics:
• A Visual Guide to Keyword Targeting and On-Page SEO
How to Leverage:
Aside from adding original and unique images and video in your text, it’s
important to ensure the media both ads to the user experience, as well as fol-
lows basic optimization guidelines.
Here are a couple of guides covering both video and image SEO:
• Wistia’s Guide to Video SEO
• Image SEO: Optimize images for search engines
4 . Personalization
In 2009, Google turned on personalized search for everyone. If you visit a site,
and Google thinks you had a good experience, they are more likely to surface
that site again in your search results.
• Email history
• Shopping history
• Maps history
• Device
• … and many more (rumored to be over 2000+ signals)
How to Leverage:
For websites, increasing engagement through all available channels is the
key to increasing visibility through personalized search. This means posi-
tively engaging your visitors/customers through all points of possible contact
including your website, emails, app installs, and even your physical location,
when applicable.
To put it simply: make sure they want to engage with you again!
For a business with physical locations, local intent is a huge factor in personal-
ized search. Make sure your Local SEO is dialed in as tight as possible.
sites. Sites further away from trusted sites are more likely not to be trusted.
How to Leverage:
Many types of links are valuable, but generally, you want to seek links from
trusted, high authority sites.
Many SEO tool providers offer link metrics. Both Moz and Majestic
offer link metrics (although limited at the free level)
• Majestic: Important metrics are Trust Flow and Citation Flow
• Moz Link Explorer: Important metrics are Domain Authority and Spam Score
6 . Relevance of Links
Imagine you own a pizza shop in Honolulu. If you were Google,
which of the following would you give more weight?
• A German plastic manufacturer links to you with the word “website”
• A Hawaiian restaurant critic links to you with the words “best pizza in Hawaii”
How to Leverage:
By researching your link targets properly, work to secure links that are relevant
to your topics.
Remember the Golden Rule of Link Building: Will this link bring
engaged, highly qualified visitors to my website?
7 . Social Sharing
If you want to watch SEOs argue, bring up social sharing as a ranking factor.
But we’re not going to argue today because this isn’t about ranking factors. This
is about success factors.
On one hand, Google has consistently stated they don’t use raw social counts
in their ranking algorithms. On the other hand, study after study shows a
strong correlation between social sharing and higher rankings.
It doesn’t matter how it works. It’s widely agreed that broad social sharing
can help a page to rank, either directly or—more likely–indirectly.
The reason is simple: regardless of algorithms, social sharing can put your
content in front of more eyeballs. Marketing 101. Content with wide social
sharing enjoys greater distribution in front of influencers, and social sharing
aggregators can often create downstream links to the page.
How to Leverage:
No magic bullets here. They key is to build your social influence and create
content that encourages social sharing. It’s not a strategy everyone can master,
but it’s powerful.
8 . Page Structure
Similar to Layout and Design, Page Structure helps you to organize your con-
tent in ways that Google can better understand it and display in search results.
How to Leverage:
Best practices for Page Structure include:
1. Organize your content into clear hierarchy of titles, headings (h1, h2, h3, etc.),
body text, lists and tables
2. Use subheadings when called for
3. Group thematically related ideas together, i.e., within the same content blog,
paragraph, list, etc
4. Use an Inverted Pyramid style of writing
5. Optimize further for Featured Snippets
9 . Content Depth
Consider these two seemingly opposed concepts:
• Content length likely isn’t a ranking factor
• Longer content tends to rank higher
SEOs have been debating this for years, and empathetically stress that content
doesn’t need to belong to rank. Case in point: Consider this page from the US
Navy, which ranks for 1000s of searches a month. It doesn’t need extra content
because it satisfies the user intent.
On the other hand—all things being equal—longer content tends to rank
higher. Nearly every SEO correlation studies ever performed confirm this.
How to Leverage:
In reality, it’s not the length of your content, but the depth of your content that
matters. Content that fully explores a topic, including related questions, is
likely to earn more visibility that content that only lightly covers a subject.
10 . Topical Authority
It’s hard—typically—to rank for a competitive search query with only a single
page website. Sites that do well in Google search results tend to publish reg-
ularly in specific areas of expertise over time, building content, links, and
authority.
Sites that rank well for a particular topic often find it much easier to rank new
content on that same topic, even with few external links.
How to Leverage:
• Become an authority on a topic by covering the topic thoroughly over time,
creating multiple posts/pages, and earning topically relevant links.
• Organize your topic using smart URL structures, i.e., if you were writing
about “link building,” place all your link building post in the /link-building/
folder, so that Google can associate these posts together.
• Build Topic Clusters, leveraging smart internal linking. HubSpot created a
great overview of how to accomplish this: https://research.hubspot.com/top-
ic-clusters-seo
11 . Structured Data
While Structured Data isn’t an explicit Google ranking factor, it can add
content+context to your page to not only help it to rank, but also become
more visible in search results.
Structured Data is the content behind your content, and provides search
engines with explicit information as to what your content is about.
For example, Product Schema is extremely popular in eCommerce. With
Product Schema, you can define aspects of your product such as price, photos,
and availability, so that there is absolutely no confusion to search engines.
The SEO agency Distilled has repeatedly shown through testing how adding
various types of structured data has helped in rankings. (It doesn’t help in all
cases, but often does.)
Aside from adding clarity to your content, the other way Structured Data
improves your visibility is by triggering Rich Snippets in search results, which
we covered earlier.
How to Leverage:
First of all, if you are unfamiliar with Structured Data, how to imple-
ment it, or the types of content you should mark up, here are a
couple of resources to get you started:
• Google’s Introduction to Structured Data
• What is Structured Data? And Why Should You Implement It?
Be sure to test your markup using Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool.
Check out these case studies, all with search visibility improvements:
• Case Study: The Impact of hreflang Tag
• 3 Hreflang Case Studies
• HREFLang Fix Results in 58% Increase in Local Traffic
Hreflang isn’t appropriate to all circumstances (i.e., you only target web con-
tent to a single language and country) but if you want to expand across dialects
and borders, it offers a great opportunity.
How to Leverage:
Hreflang implementation is straightforward, but the specifics can be daunting
even to the most experienced SEO.
After you get everything set up, be sure to test using the Sistrix tool
below, and checking Google Search Console for hreflang errors.
1. Overview: Use hreflang for language and regional URLs
2. Generate: The hreflang Tags Generator Tool
3. Test: hreflang Validator
There are several different ways searchers can search for your brand
and associate it with specific keywords:
• Brand: Nike
• Navigational: nike.com
• Brand + Keyword: nike running shoes
• Brand + Navigation: running shoes nike.com
Many marketers have wisely observed that when the volume of these branded
searches increases, the brand tends to show up even when searchers aren’t spe-
cifically looking for it.
Part of the reason, many SEOs believe, is that brand searches create an entity
relationship between the brand and the keyword, i.e., “nike” is an entity associ-
ated with “running shoes,” so it tends to show up more when running shoes are
searched.
The other reason is much more obvious: brand searches influence Google’s
auto-suggest. The more people search for “running shoes nike,” the more likely
Google will suggest that exact phrase when people search for “running shoes.”
How to Leverage:
Building your brand so that searchers actually seek you out by name (and don’t
simply stumble upon you in search results) is one of the strongest drivers of
traffic there is. It also helps build a defensive “moat” around your business. The
more people looking for your website, the less likely for Google to push down
your site in rankings.
Building up your brand is hard work, but there are clever shortcuts
many savvy marketers have tried. For example:
• A television commercial that encourages viewers to search Google for “Chick-
en by Bob” can create branded search around those terms.
14 . AMP
Google likes to say that Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) isn’t a ranking factor.
And SEOs equally like to point out that AMP is indeed a visibility factor.
How to Leverage:
Setting up AMP can be tricky for smaller sites, but available tools
get better each month. Check out these resources:
• Accelerated Mobile Pages Project
• AMP Optimization for Success: SEO Steps, Tips & Tools
• How to Properly Setup Google AMP on Your WordPress Site
15 . HTTPS
Even by Google standards, that the actual ranking boost from HTTPS is small.
One Googler called it a tiebreaker.
Even so, the SEO benefit from HTTPS is bigger than the sum of its
parts.
Part of the reason is the way browsers display HTTPS sites as secure. Cur-
rently, most browsers grace secure sites with a trusted green bar, while Chrome
aggressively labels certain pages “insecure” if they don’t have HTTPS.
Going forward, browsers may do away with green bars altogether and stated
plans to issue warnings for all non-secure pages. In this case, non-HTTPS
pages might soon be considered a negative ranking factor by default.
How to Leverage:
Fortunately, making your site secure through HTTPS is easier than ever. Many
web hosts even offer it free through services like Let’s Encrypt and Cloudflare.
Otherwise, we recommend this handy HTTPS migration checklist from
Aleyda Solis.
FOCUS ON THESE
8 Page Structure
Feel free to use this infographic with proper attribution. Click here for high-res version.
Influential Factors
Influential success factors aren’t always required for successful SEO, but they
can give you the edge over the search competition. Frequently, they make a
huge difference.
1 . User-Friendly URLs
Good URLs can make a big difference in all areas of SEO: crawling, ranking,
CTR, and sharing.
A few rules for URLs that SEOs have found true through testing and
performance:
1. Shorter URLs > Longer URLs
2. Keywords in URLs help, but not too many
3. 1-2 folder levels, tops
4. Generally Avoid: Numbers, special characters, and keep parameters to a minimum
Learn More:
• URL Best Practices
2 . Parameter Control
Too many parameters can cause a lot of work for search engines, and also
create a ton of duplicate content issues. The number of new URLs created by
parameters can add up fast.
Google provides a specialized tool within Search Console to deal with URL
parameters. While the URL Parameter Tool is very powerful, configuring it
correctly can be confusing for anyone other than expert users. For many mar-
keters, it’s simply easier and safer to control parameters using rel=canonical.
Learn More:
• All About Supplementary Content in the Google Quality Rater’s Guidelines
If your website is associated with a real-world business, it’s often helpful to build
business citations to support it. This is even more critical if you do Local SEO.
5 . Robots Control
While making your site crawlable and accessible to search engines is a critical
ranking factor, often telling Google what not to index and where not to crawl is
just as important.
Some areas where you may want to restrict search robots from
crawling or indexing your site:
1. Duplicate content
2. Low-quality content
3. Low-value search results pages
4. Administration pages
5. Members only areas
6. Pages with privacy concerns
While robots.txt is often the first choice to bend bots to your will, it’s also a
very blunt tool that lacks the refinement of robots meta directives, canonical
tags, HTTP headers, or other methods of robots control.
Learn More:
• The ultimate guide to controlling Crawling and Indexing
6 . Link Velocity
A common scenario: You build and launch your excellent content, earn a bunch
of links and sail into rankings and traffic glory. Then, over time, your rankings
start to slide. Eventually, even though you have far more links than your com-
petitors, your content is relegated to the 3rd page of Google.
Link Velocity is often thought of as a Freshness Factor. The concept is the rate
at which sites link to you can indicate how fresh and relevant your content is.
If your link velocity slows down or stops altogether, your content may no
longer be fresh or worthy of ranking. If your link velocity speeds up over time,
it may indicate your content deserves to be pushed up in search results.
7 . Sitemaps
While sitemaps probably likely an actual ranking factor, using sitemaps effec-
tively can play a role in SEO success, especially for larger sites.
Sitemaps can help Google find and prioritize content on your site, in ways that
may help them to do it faster or more efficiently than they otherwise would.
While most people think of XML sitemaps, HTML sitemaps can add additional
value. For a cool example, check out the New York Times HTML sitemap.
Learn More:
• Learn About Sitemaps
• What is an XML sitemap and why should you have one?
“
In the same way that Google trusts sites less when they link
to spammy sites or bad neighborhoods, parts of our system
encourage links to good sites.”
– Matt Cutts
“
Our point of view, external links to other sites, so links from
your site to other people’s sites isn’t specifically a ranking
factor. But it can bring value to your content and that in turn
can be relevant for us in search. And whether or not they are
not followed, doesn’t really matter.”
– John Mueller
Sometimes, SEOs are scared of linking out, fearing they’ll transfer authority
elsewhere. The truth is, Google wants to reward sites that offer good experi-
ences. What’s more, multiple SEO experiments and correlation studies show
that linking out to high-quality resources is correlated with higher rankings.
9 . Site Architecture
Site Architecture refers to the organization of your website, navigation, and
how the pages are linked together. An example would be “Homepage > Catego-
ries > Products” while defining how all of these different elements link to one
another.
A clear Site Architecture not only helps Google with crawling, but
also helps distribute topical link authority while helping users with
navigation. All of these elements are important.
1. Cross-linking to related categories/products/pages
2. Flat architecture: No more than three clicks to the deepest level
3. Breadcrumbs
Learn More:
• Smart Internal Linking for SEO
• Successful Site Architecture for SEO
• Google Guide to Breadcrumbs
10 . Pagination
Pagination is another aspect with assists Google with crawling and indexing of
your site, though it is not itself a direct ranking factor.
Learn More:
• Google’s Guide to Paginated Content
• Pagination: link rel=”prev” and rel=”next”
11 . Domain Age
One one hand, Google has clearly stated that Domain Age isn’t specifically a
ranking factor. On the other hand, Google has also stated that they may look at
the date when they first crawled a website, or the age of links pointing to a site.
SEOs have often noted the difficulty in getting a newer site to rank for com-
petitive terms, and called this period the “Sandbox.”
So while there’s nothing specifically stopping a new site from ranking, it’s
typically easier for older sites to rank because they’ve had longer to build up
link and authority signals. In fact, almost all SEO correlation studies find a rela-
tionship between older domains and higher rankings.
Learn More:
• How does Google determine domain age, and is it important for ranking?
For example, if your search topic were “apple watch,” you’d expect to
find certain keywords and phrases more often than others, such as:
• Models
• Series 3
• GPS
• Heart Rate
• … and more
Multiple SEO studies have found that higher ranking content tends to have
more associated keywords and phrases, and adding related phrases can
improve a page’s ranking.
14 . Domain Extension
When people first get into SEO, they often ask if they should use a .com or .org
(or .marketing!) for their domain name. The general answer is that you should
choose a domain extension best suited to your business and branding, but it’s a
little more nuanced than that.
Google tends to treat all generic Top Level Domains (gTLDs) equally.
Examples of gTLDs include:
• .com – Accounts for 75% of all gTLDs
• .net, .org, info, .biz – Popular alternatives to .com
• .design, .tech, .online, app – Newer Brand gTLDs
• .edu, .gov, .mil – Restricted, Sponsored generic Top-Level Domains (sTLD)
• .london, .tokyo, .vegas – Region-specific extensions that are treated as gTLDs
In the end, most evidence indicates that the domain extension you use doesn’t
really matter, with one huge exception: use of Country Code Top-Level
Domains (ccTLDs).
ccTLDs—such as .hk, .au, .fr, and .in—are used by Google to geo-target your
website to a specific region. This means that by using a ccTLD, you may influ-
ence your site’s ability to show up in search on a region-by-region basis.
Typically, if your website servers users in multiple countries, it’s sometimes
better to use a gTLD and specify language/region variations using hreflang.
15 . Server Location
Along with international targeting signals such as hreflang, and ccTLD, the loca-
tion of your server may influence your search visibility within a specific region.
Today, use of Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) and cloud infrastructure can
dampen these effects by delivering content to locations all over the world. That
said, if you serve users in a specific area, it can be helpful to have your server
physically located nearby.
Learn More:
• The impact of IP host location on your site SEO
• Working with multi-regional websites
We know that Google watches and records what websites people visit and
bookmark through the Chrome browser. It’s not a stretch to believe that they
could use this information in their ranking algorithms.
In fact, there have been many experiments and anecdotal evidence of site
seeing a boost in Google rankings after increasing site traffic through other
means, such as Facebook ads, TV commercials, and viral Reddit posts.
Regardless of whether it’s an actual ranking factor, an increase in both direct
and referral traffic helps your visibility in multiple ways. More eyeballs on your
content can lead to more links and shares, which directly helps your SEO.
Furthermore, diversifying your traffic beyond Google makes you more resil-
ient to the ups and downs of Google’s algorithm.
17 . Readability
SEOs often focus on Reading Level as a possible ranking factor, but that
misses the point.
Learn More:
• How To Improve Content Readability And How That Will Affect Your SEO
• How to Use Yoast SEO: The Readability Analysis
• Grammarly: Free Writing Assistant
18 . Factually Correct
There’s plenty of evidence that Google wants to rank sites that Factually Cor-
rect over websites that play fast and loose with the truth.
1. First, there’s a Google research paper which defines Knowledge-Based Trust,
which is a method of scoring websites on the correctness of their factual in-
formation instead of external factors like links.
2. Then, in 2017 Google updated their Quality Raters Guidelines to included
guidelines for rating pages with “demonstrably inaccurate content” as a Low-
est Quality Page. Generally, when Google includes something in its Search
Quality Raters Guidelines, it suggests they are trying to solve for it algorithmi-
cally.
3. Finally, Googlers have recently made several statements indicating their desire
to fact check web pages.
So not only can it pay to have factually accurate content, it can potentially
hurt to have factually inaccurate content. (For more negative SEO Success
Factors, see the last section.)
19 . Author Reputation
We’re reaching the end of the list of Influential Ranking Factors, and here you
find Author Reputation. Why is it near the end? To be honest, nobody knows
how big of a deal it is.
The idea that Google wants to know who authored a page, and use that infor-
mation for ranking websites, has been around a long time. In fact, most of this
information comes from Google itself.
• A Google patent titled “Agent Rank” describes a system for scoring authors
not only on reputation (based on how often the author’s work is cited by
others) but on subject expertise as well. So if you become an author-authority
on “car parts,” Google may rank your content on car parts higher. Most people
today refer to this as Author Rank.
• Google executives and engineers have frequently been quoted discussed
scoring content based on authorship.
• Authorship photos were supposed to be a step in this direction. Sadly, the
photos were discontinued, but many believe Author Rank lived on.
• Finally, Google’s Search Quality Raters guidelines state that High-Quality
Content makes clear “Who (what individual, company, business, foundation,
etc.) created the content on the page you are evaluating.”
In the real world, it’s difficult to observe the impact of any Author Rank, but it
could be significant.
In any case, it’s best practice to make it clear who created your content.
1. If it’s an individual author, you can include an author byline and author page
on the site. The author can also build up expertise by writing authoritative
content around the web, and linking author profiles.
2 If content is authored by a company or group, make sure your About and
Contact information is clear and up to date, so it’s obvious who is responsible
for your content.
Learn More:
• What is Author Rank?
To be fair, Google has stated that “having whois privacy turned on isn’t auto-
matically bad” – it’s more about the combined signals that indicate manipula-
tion.
Furthermore, the effects of recent GDPR regulation throws a wrench in all
this, as more and more website registration data becomes private by default.
At the end of the day, keep the following best practices in mind:
• Keep registration information up-to-date and consistent. If public, make sure
the information is accurate, and if possible, tied to real-world information
• Frequent changes in WHOIS ownership information, including lapses during
expiration periods, could be a signal for Google to trust the domain less.
• There are many legitimate reasons for using private WHOIS, but using a net-
work of private domains to link together—especially if Google can tie them
together—may spell trouble for your rankings.
FOCUS ON THESE
7 Sitemaps 17 Readability
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Myth Factors
Feel safe to ignore these unimportant success factors. In fact, a few on this list
may do more harm than good.
3 . Google Adsense
Among the newly initiated in SEO, there’s a persistent myth that using Google
Adsense may help your rankings.
4 . Keyword Density
This is a tough one to include in “Not Important” factors because yes, you typi-
cally need to use relevant keywords, phrases, and topics in your content to rank.
That said, focusing on keyword density—the idea that your content should
contain a minimum threshold percentage of exact match keywords—doesn’t
typically lead to optimal results. It’s not that keyword usage isn’t important,
but rather there are far better ways of optimizing.
In fact, recent ranking factor studies have shown either little or no impor-
tance whatsoever with keyword density.
Learn More:
• What’s the ideal keyword density of a page?
• More than Keywords: 7 Concepts of Advanced On-Page SEO
5 . W3C Validation
The rumor that W3C validation is important for search rankings probably
started with web development firms that promised “valid HTML code.”
In fact, most websites have multiple validation errors, even Google itself.
What’s much, MUCH more important is if Google and web browsers can prop-
erly render the page. If you want to focus on what’s more important, run your
URLs through Google’s Fetch and Render tool.
And if you want to be concerned about W3C standards, it’s far more helpful to
users to focus on accessibility standards.
Learn More:
• Is HTML validation necessary for ranking?
6 . Multiple H1 Tags
Like W3C validation, SEOs often get obsessed with proper heading structure.
One, and only one, H1 heading tag per page is the rule. And it is not to be broken.
Learn More:
• Google: Use As Many H1 Tags As You Want
8 . Dedicated IP
Another old SEO myth that was likely propagated by web hosting companies
looking to upsell services.
This was more a problem when Google found a web server full of spam web-
sites. In this case, any other site on the same server using the same IP might
look suspicious. If you are concerned that this is your circumstance (it typically
isn’t) the simple solution is to find a more reputable hosting provider.
While there were historical advantages to hosting your site with a unique IP in
some edge cases, today many hosting companies don’t even offer it as an option.
Learn More:
• Myth busting: virtual hosts vs. dedicated IP addresses
9 . Meta Keywords
Google doesn’t use the meta keyword tag for ranking purposes.
IGNORE THESE
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Negative Factors
Not all success factors are positive. The ones listed below possess the power to
damage your visibility. Proceed with caution.
1 . Spam
The whole point of Google is to deliver the opposite of spam, so producing
spam isn’t going to help you rank.
Spam takes many different forms. It may include, but isn’t limited to:
• Spun / low quality content
• Doorway pages
• Low quality auto-generated content
• Scraped content
• Malware
If you’ve made it this far through SEO Success Factors, you know this is not
what you want to produce.
2 . Manipulative Links
Google hates unnatural links.
To be fair, unnatural links are less of a big deal ever since Google released
Penguin 4.0, which is very granular and often likely to ignore bad links than
penalize you for them. That said, naughty linking practices remain a major cause
of lower rankings, either through manual penalties or algorithmic actions.
Learn More:
Learn to avoid link schemes and follow the rules of link building.
3 . Thin Content
Content that adds little value, uniqueness, or substance qualifies as thin content.
Especially damning to Google are thin affiliate sites, which exist solely to lead
folks to affiliate sites while adding little extra value.
4 . Non-unique Content
While Google doesn’t penalize duplicate content, content that is non-unique
can get filtered from search results.
Aside from following the advice earlier in this guide on duplicate content, it’s
best practice to have at least 2-3 sentences up to a few hundred words of unique
content on each page to have a chance of ranking.
Learn More:
• Duplicate Content SEO Advice From Google
5 . Cloaking
Cloaking is generally defined as the practice of showing certain content to users,
while showing different content to search engines – typically for sneaky reasons.
Don’t do this.
Sometimes cloaking is fine if done for the right reason, but these are usually
edge cases.
Learn More:
• Cloaking
7 . Canonical Errors
Another common error. If URL 1 has a canonical tag pointing to URL 2, then URL
1 isn’t going to be indexed or ranked (as long as Google respects the canonical.)
Learn More:
• 6 Extreme Canonical Tricks
9. Keyword Stuffing
Keyword stuffing is the art of stuffing keywords where keywords shouldn’t be
stuffed. Enough?
Learn More:
• Irrelevant Keywords
Learn More:
• Hidden text and links
A single notice or two likely won’t hurt much, but a large number of such
removal requests will likely hurt.
Learn More:
• Blocking Googlebot from CSS & JavaScript Can Hurt Google Rankings
The converse is also true: shorter, cleaner URLs tend to rank slightly better.
Whatever the reason, it often pays to keep your URLs clean and tidy.
16 . Slow Speed
We’ve covered the multiple outsized effects of making your site fast, but the
opposite is also true. Slow sites can be degraded in search results.
When Google first included speed in their algorithm, it was only supposed
to impact the slowest of the slow, the bottom 1% off all pages. Since then, SEOs
have observed the speed effect as a smooth curve along all sites.
Don’t be pokey
That said, there are two different ways that overly-aggressive ads
can hurt your rankings:
1. Google’s Top Heavy algorithm punishes sites with too many ads above the
fold, or in the primary content area.
2. The Intrusive Interstitial update punishes mobile sites with aggressive pop-
ups and interstitials
The best advice is to have a deep variety of anchor text links pointing at your
site, and even avoiding dictating anchor text when asking for links.
Learn More:
• Anchor Text Guide
• A Data Driven Guide To Anchor Text (And Its Impact On SEO)
22 . Redirect Chains
301 redirects are awesome! They get people and search robots where they
need to go, and they even pass PageRank.
23 . UGC Spam
It’s terrific when you produce great content, but not so much if you let users
submit spam to your website.
User-generated spam can include spam comments, forum postings, and
accounts on free hosts. The general rule is, if you host it on your site, you’re
responsible for it. If you let your users run astray, it can hurt your rankings.
Learn More:
• User-generated spam
24 . Sneaky Redirects
Sneaky redirection is the practice of sending users to a page they didn’t expect,
typically spam.
SEOs often report that this process can take many months or more.
If your site has a bad domain history, it’s typically best to do a link audit and
disavow, resolve any penalties, create new content, submit sitemaps, fix tech-
nical issues, and build new links.
If any of these negative success factors impact you and do the hard work of
cleaning up, your rankings will return, hopefully sooner than later.
AVOID THESE
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