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Web Advisor » Top Search Engine Ranking Factors

Top Search Engine Ranking Factors

PageRank is not the only factor that Google uses to rank search results. Google uses more than 200 "signals" to calculate the rank of a page. The top 10 factors that positively affect your search engine rankings are:

  1. Keyword Use in Title Tag
  2. Anchor Text of Inbound Links
  3. Global Link Popularity of Site
  4. Age of Site
  5. Link Popularity within the Site's Internal Link Structure
  6. Topical Relevance of Inbound Links to Site
  7. Link Popularity of Site in Topical Community
  8. Keyword Use in Body Text
  9. Global Link Popularity of Linking Site
  10. Topical Relationship of Linking Page

The top factors that negatively affect a search engine spider's ability to crawl a page or harm its ranking are the follows:

  1. Server often inaccessible to bots
  2. Content very similar to or duplicate of existing content in the index
  3. External links to low-quality/spam sites
  4. Duplicate title/meta tags on many pages
  5. Overuse of targeted keywords
  6. Participation in link schemes or actively selling links
  7. Slow server response times
  8. Inbound links from spam sites
  9. Low levels of visitors to the site