Google Ranking Parameters

Just to be clear, I have included things like META keywords that Google do not use. What Google actually use, and the weight given to the parameters varies often.

On Page Factors

Body Text
- Keyword Density
- Keyword Occurrence
- Position on Page
Title
- Density
- Occurrence
- Position of Word Within Title
Headings
- H1
- H2
- H3
- H4
META Keywords
META Description
URL
- Domain
- Word Separators
-? and &
- id=
Alt Text
- Not in a Link
- In a Link
- Imagemap Alt Text
Words in Links
Proximity (in body text and title)
- Positive, negative
- Stopwords
Case
- e.g. ciml and CIML
Plurals & Synonyms (e.g. widget and widgets)

Off Page Factors

PageRank
High PR Links
- From Without the Domain
- From Within the Domain
- - Subdomain
- IP
- - Class C
Anchor Text
- 1 Link v. Many links from 1 domain v. Many links from many Domains
- - Subdomains
- In Alt Text
- IP
- - Class C
- Density
- Phrase or Words
- Stemming (e.g. “cert advisories” example from Matt Cutts at PubConference)
- Partial Matches (i.e. how much boost do links with 'webmaster' help for 'webmaster world')
Theming
- Words Near a Link from Another Site
- Title and Body Text of Linking Page
- Title and Body Text of Pages that Link to Linking Page, etc.
- Other Pages in the Same Domain
Links from Guestbooks/Blogs/Web Stat’s etc.
Reciprocity
Toolbar Data
Click Tracking

PageRank

Definition of PageRank
- Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine
- The PageRank Citation Ranking: Bringing Order to the Web
- Principal Eigenvector of the Normalised Citation Matrix of the Web
- - PR(A) = (1-d) + d (PR(T1)/C(T1) + ... + PR(Tn)/C(Tn))
Discrepancies
- Unspidered URLs
- Invisible Links
- PR0 Penalty
- The "Can have PageRank But Not Pass it On" Penalty
Dilution
- It is Real
- PR Feedback Loops Can Magnify its Affect
- PR Feedback Loops Usually Don’t Magnify its Affect Significantly
- For Toolbar PR and Rankings it’s Irrelevant
Many Links on a Page
- If Many Links , Are They All Followed?
- If Many Links, Does Less PR Flow Than Expected? (recommendation on google.com webmaster pages)
Rank Source
- Essential
- - PageRank Wouldn’t Converge Without It
- Not Important to Individual Pages
- Measurable?
Toolbar
- Log Scale ( or coefficient at log(c) )
- The Toolbar Scale is a Key Variable to Isolate

Penalties

Banned
-30 (that’s one for the old-timers)
PR0
Guestbook / Links Pages
Can Have PageRank but Not Pass it On
- Change in link: Behaviour
“Slow Death”
- Many 'URL Only' Phrases
- Very Shallow Crawling
Key Phrase Penalties
- AKA 'OOP Penalties'

Other Factors

Redirects
Duplicate Pages
Near Duplicate Pages
Geolocation
Server Problems

There are certainly more things for this list; these are just what I could think of at the time of writing.

If you want to find whether these parameters are used by Google, and to what extent, then remember these things: SEO is Science. Variable isolation is the key to understanding search engines. Correlation is not causation.

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