Complete List of Search Ranking Factors

Analyzing Ranking Factors

A ranking factor is the term we use to refer to a component or metric of a given webpage that can be used to help gauge the level of quality of a website and/or its relevance to a particular word or phrase. You could also consider a ranking factor a variable within the search engine algorithms that compute a site's rank among their result's pages.

The most important aspect of building a search engine algorithm is to define and implement a system of variables that are used to rank websites on a search results page that corresponds to a user's query. The variables are gathered from various components of a webpage and input to a ranking function which is essentially a partial equation. The ranking function turns an initial set of variables into a single variable which then gets added to a larger equation to compute the final value of an unknown term. The whole system of equations is known as an algorithm.

Each ranking factor discussed on this site will be analyzed in full detail and have the initial equation or ranking function generated on the page. In the final analysis, all the individual rankings functions will be combined to form a complete algorithm. Be warned, some ranking functions may be several lines long, and the algorithm consists of hundreds of unique functions.

The two biggest factors to consider when organizing a results page, is the relevance and quality of each result, as it pertains to the user's query. These two parameters are often independent of each other and can be measured and quantified in a variety of ways. Potentially hundreds of variables may be used to issue both a "relevancy score" and a "quality score". Each score will be considered when displaying the results among the SERPs. You'll see that of all the variables a search engine would use to rank a webpage, they can all be divided into two main categories. Relevance and Quality.

Relevance

The precise definition of relevance is somewhat elusive, yet it is important for reasons that seem obvious. In early days of the old search engines, measuring relevance to word or phrase that a user submitted was really the only tool necessary to display useful results to the user. But with the addition of millions of new webpages, many similar in content, another factor needed to be incorporated, since there could be thousands of results equally relevant to a search term.

Quality

The quality of something, anything, can be a very subjective matter. When analyzing a body of work, such as a written paper (since webpages are similar in nature), the quality can be widely disputed. But regardless, if a consensus can be made, something with higher quality is said to be more superior, distinguishing, and excellent.

Full List of Ranking Factors For SEO