Understanding Some of Google’s Site Ranking Factors

Posted at February 2, 2010

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There are several factors that Google takes into consideration when ranking pages. The age of the domain, it’s history, keywords used in the domain’s meta tags and body content, the location of the IP address, which data center the host server is in, how many sites link back to the domain, how many of the link backs are relevant, whether the link is one way – these are all the most commonly known factors but there are others. For content, Google looks at keyword density, code to text ratio, links within the page, freshness of the content and more.

When they look at the inbound links, they look at quality of the sites linking in too and the same content methods of those external sites. Many SEO’s know that the age of the linked sites and the relevancy of the page’s content to whom you are linked is very important. It’s also important for geographical targetted services to link within there regions too. For example, you wouldn’t want to recommend an Accounting service in Texas obtain link backs from a Site in India that sells Linens – you get the idea, quality is better than quantity.

Google has been known to impose penalties for over-optimization, buying links, selling links, comment spamming, duplicate content and keyword stuffing. These penalties could include lower page rank (PR), lower positions within the search results, or even exclusion from the search engine results completely.

If you’re building a website, it would be a good idea to talk to a search engine professional for tips and advice prior to going live. Get an understanding of the SERPS, not just Google but Yahoo, Bing and others. Read the guidelines provided by the search engines to help you filter through the suggestions you may read online.

Remember, when it comes to SEO be careful what you read online, double check it with SERP guidelines and make sure you’re not reading dated material (good advice in 2002 might not be good advice for 2010 SEO since it’s constantly evolving).

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