Search Engine Ranking Factors 2011: Overview

The Search engine ranking Factors released today by SEOmoz is widely considered the industry standard on what metrics Google uses to rank pages. While not directly from Google, the information is gathered by surveying industry experts as well as doing in-depth correlation analysis of page attributes.

There are some interesting changes from this year’s information and the ranking factors of 2009. Most interestingly, there is more emphasis on the social aspect of your website. The data seems to suggest that it is becoming a more heavily weighted factor. Not only how many times your website is shared or re-tweeted, but whom. How much influence do the people sharing your information have? Influence is said to be derived from the amount of followers and how often their connections share their information. That being said, it is probably a lot more beneficial to get your link shared by and industry expert than your neighbor.

The report also goes into details about negative factors and how heavily each specific tactic can affect your website rankings in search results. The usual suspects such as cloaking and malware hosting were found in these lists but there are a few that we found to be surprising. Having a high percentage of anchor links and having a high spike in links were said to have a moderate level of negativity. This is interesting because  link building campaigns are going to show high spikes in links on certain days and most SEOs are going to use anchor links while implementing these campaigns.

Moving toward the future most respondents of the survey believe that there are going to be a few key components that will play a bigger role in search engine optimization. Perceived value to reader is a factor that we have been hoping for. With so many low quality sites ranking for heavily searched keywords, a change in this department is welcomed with open arms and will surely better the search results of the future. Additionally, social signals on the domain and page level are going to continue to increase per the experts polled in the survey. This would include amount of times your pages and domain are shared and tweeted and it will also take into account your website or companies presence on the bigger social media mediums such as Facebook, Twitter and some social bookmarking site such as Digg, StubleUpon and Reddit.