Google Ranking Factors

In my opinion, these are Google's most important ranking factors. Some of these may or may not be actual ranking factors and some may not be significant.

1) Content

a- Keyword in Title Tag

b- Keyword in regular text

c- Keyword toward top section of the page

d- Keyword in Heading Tags H1, H2, H3

e- Keyword in links

f- Keyword in image file names

g- Keywor in Meta Tags

h- Keyword in Alt Tags

i- Keyword in comments

2) Links

a- Total number of incoming links

b- Links from high PR sites or authoritative sites

c- On-topic Links

d- Having Keywords in the anchor text of incoming links

f- Having keywords in internal links within the site and menus

g- Age of the incoming links (Currently links less than 3-6 months old, may not even get counted)

h- One-way links may get more credit than 2-way or reciprocal Links

i - Links coming from pages with less outgoing links are better. Links coming from pages with over 100 links are no good.

3) Factors that may count against you

a- Too much keyword repetition

b- Hidden content via text same colour as background or CSS or other such methods

c- Javascript Redirects or certain other redirects

d- Cross linking bunch of sites to each other in the same network

e- Doorway pages. Pages that are specifically written for search engines and cannot be found by your site visitors via your normal navigation menus.

f- PPC (Porn/Pills/Casino) : Adult, Pharmacy and Casino related content

g- Duplicate content : watch out for those duplicate filters. Make sure your site doesn't have content from other sites or no one else has copied you.

h- Age of your domain. Brand new or less than 6-month old domains may be in the Google Sandbox

i- Participating in Link Farms or services that try to artificially increase your links by doing shortcuts

j- Cloaking : Showing a page to search engines different than what the users see based on their IP address

4) Factors that won't count against you, but are problems

a- Dynamic content, such as shopping cart based content may not get indexed

b- Primarily Graphic or Flash based websites

c- Javascript content and/or menus

In addition check out the Google Webmaster Guidelines:

http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html

Bruce Gow specialises in search engine optimisation, internet marketing

& article submission.

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