Google Ranking Factors for SEO
A speculative list of Google ranking factors. Here's a quick summary for busy readers:
Good
- Keyword in URL, domain name and Title
- Keyword in H1, H2 and H3
- Quality (High PR) and quantity of inbound links
- Anchor text of inbound links
- Links from expert sites
- Site Age (i.e. older = stability = good)
- Listing in DMOZ (increasingly harder to achieve)
- Thematic similarity of sites producing incoming links
- Fresh pages (good for blogs)
- Efficiently structured navigation (i.e. number of clicks required to get to a given page)
- Keyword proximity (adjacent keywords are rewarded)
Bad
- Excessive cross-linking
- Keyword stuffing
- Links to bad neighborhoods (i.e. linkfarms etc)
- Site Age (new sites are sandboxed)
- Cloaking (If detected, then wave goodbye to SE references)
- Keyword dilution
- Short domain expiration durations (possible indicator to a throw-away domain)
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