Googles Top 3 Ranking Factors Content Links Rank

Google's Top 3 Ranking Factors: Content, Links & Rank. Brain Patrick Stox & JR Oakes

Google uses over 200 ranking factors, some of which have more than 50 variations. Google's Top 3 Ranking Factors: Content, Links & Rank. Brain Patrick Stox @patrickstox | JR Oakes @jroakes

In March of this year, Google identified 3 as the most important. Google's Top 3 Ranking Factors: Content, Links & Rank. Brain Patrick Stox @patrickstox | JR Oakes @jroakes

Content | Links | Rank. Brain Google's Top 3 Ranking Factors: Content, Links & Rank. Brain Patrick Stox @patrickstox | JR Oakes @jroakes

Content Google's Top 3 Ranking Factors: Content, Links & Rank. Brain Patrick Stox @patrickstox | JR Oakes @jroakes

Content is more than words on a page. Google's Top 3 Ranking Factors: Content, Links & Rank. Brain Patrick Stox @patrickstox | JR Oakes @jroakes

Google's Top 3 Ranking Factors: Content, Links & Rank. Brain Patrick Stox @patrickstox | JR Oakes @jroakes

Content Relevance and Experience are important to Rank Google's Top 3 Ranking Factors: Content, Links & Rank. Brain Patrick Stox @patrickstox | JR Oakes @jroakes

Content Google's Top 3 Ranking Factors: Content, Links & Rank. Brain Patrick Stox @patrickstox | JR Oakes @jroakes

Content Google's Top 3 Ranking Factors: Content, Links & Rank. Brain Patrick Stox @patrickstox | JR Oakes @jroakes

Content is. . . An experience Something that fulfills an intent Something you need to trust Something you won’t wait for Google's Top 3 Ranking Factors: Content, Links & Rank. Brain Patrick Stox @patrickstox | JR Oakes @jroakes

Content Make sure your Content is: Useful and informative More valuable and useful than other sites Credible High-quality Engaging Google's Top 3 Ranking Factors: Content, Links & Rank. Brain Patrick Stox @patrickstox | JR Oakes @jroakes

Content quality signals you control: Broken links Wrong information Grammatical mistakes, Spelling mistakes, Reading level Excessive distractions Page load speed Website features Intent (Know, Know Simple, Do, Device Action, Website, Visit-in-person) Authority and Comprehensiveness Google's Top 3 Ranking Factors: Content, Links & Rank. Brain Patrick Stox @patrickstox | JR Oakes @jroakes

Links Google's Top 3 Ranking Factors: Content, Links & Rank. Brain Patrick Stox @patrickstox | JR Oakes @jroakes

Links Can Links Be Done Without? “We have run experiments like that internally, and the quality looks much, much worse. It turns out backlinks, even though there’s some noise and certainly a lot of spam, for the most part, are still a really, really big win in terms of quality of our search results. So we’ve played around with the idea of turning off backlink relevance, and at least for now, backlink relevance still really helps in terms of making sure that we return the best, most relevant, most topical set of search results. ” - Google's Top 3 Ranking Factors: Content, Links & Rank. Brain Matt Cutts 2014 Patrick Stox @patrickstox | JR Oakes @jroakes

Links Google's Top 3 Ranking Factors: Content, Links & Rank. Brain Patrick Stox @patrickstox | JR Oakes @jroakes

Links Google's Top 3 Ranking Factors: Content, Links & Rank. Brain Patrick Stox @patrickstox | JR Oakes @jroakes

Links Good links Google's Top 3 Ranking Factors: Content, Links & Rank. Brain Bad Links Patrick Stox @patrickstox | JR Oakes @jroakes

Links The Good Internal vs External Location matters Citations Redirects Anchor text matters Relevant Authoritative Google's Top 3 Ranking Factors: Content, Links & Rank. Brain Patrick Stox @patrickstox | JR Oakes @jroakes

Links The Bad Buying/selling links Link networks Reciprocal links Comment spam Forum spam Article directories PBNs Generic directories Press releases Guest posts Social bookmarking Google's Top 3 Ranking Factors: Content, Links & Rank. Brain Patrick Stox @patrickstox | JR Oakes @jroakes

Links Create your own opportunities for links by opening up opportunities to write for others. Google's Top 3 Ranking Factors: Content, Links & Rank. Brain Patrick Stox @patrickstox | JR Oakes @jroakes

Rank. Brain Google's Top 3 Ranking Factors: Content, Links & Rank. Brain Patrick Stox @patrickstox | JR Oakes @jroakes

Rank. Brain What We Know Rank. Brain does not affect crawling or crawl budgets (source) Rank. Brain is part of the overall Hummingbird algorithm … Hummingbird also contains other parts with names familiar to those in the SEO space, such as Panda, Penguin and Payday designed to fight spam, Pigeon designed to improve local results, Top Heavy designed to demote adheavy pages, Mobile Friendly designed to reward mobile-friendly pages and Pirate designed to fight copyright infringement. (source) Rank. Brain is one of the “hundreds” of signals that go into an algorithm that determines what results appear on a Google search page and where they are ranked (source) Google's Top 3 Ranking Factors: Content, Links & Rank. Brain Patrick Stox @patrickstox | JR Oakes @jroakes

Rank. Brain What We Know “It’s especially helpful on long-tail queries, such as the 15% never seen before each day. ” (source) Rank. Brain has become third-most important signal contributing to the result of a search query (source) While Google didn’t give groups of searches, the Bloomberg article did have a single example of a search where Rank. Brain is supposedly helping. Here it is: What’s the title of the consumer at the highest level of a food chain (source) Google's Top 3 Ranking Factors: Content, Links & Rank. Brain Patrick Stox @patrickstox | JR Oakes @jroakes

Rank. Brain What We Know One fresh example: “How many tablespoons in a cup? ” Google said that Rank. Brain favored different results in Australia versus the United States for that query because the measurements in each country are different, despite the similar names. (source) “Can you get a 100 percent score on Super Mario without a walk-through? ” There is a negative term there that is very hard to catch with the regular systems that we had, and in fact our old query parsers actually ignored the “without” part. (source) Gary Illyes used a water bottle to explain Rank. Brain. How do you know it’s water? Things like it’s clear, in a bottle, liquid, refreshing, it even says water. Google's Top 3 Ranking Factors: Content, Links & Rank. Brain Patrick Stox @patrickstox | JR Oakes @jroakes

Rank. Brain What We Know All learning that Rank. Brain does is offline, Google told us. It’s given batches of historical searches and learns to make predictions from these. (source) Google reconfirmed to us that there is a component where Rank. Brain is directly contributing somehow to whether a page ranks. (source). Google's Top 3 Ranking Factors: Content, Links & Rank. Brain Patrick Stox @patrickstox | JR Oakes @jroakes

Rank. Brain Important Concepts ● Click-through data has proven to be a critical resource for improving search ranking quality … in which the conditional probability of a click on a document x given position i is predicated on the marginal probability of the document x being relevant to the query and the marginal probabilities of documents at positions 1, . . . , i (source) ● Language Modeling, a task central to language understanding. We extend current models to deal with two key challenges present in this task: corpora and vocabulary sizes, and complex, long term structure of language. (source) ● Glove vectors / Word 2 vec / query and entity disambiguation important. Google's Top 3 Ranking Factors: Content, Links & Rank. Brain Patrick Stox @patrickstox | JR Oakes @jroakes

Resources ● ● Google’s SEO Starter Guide (source) Google Search Quality Rating Guidelines (source) Google Webmaster Guidelines (source) Moz Beginners Guide To SEO (source) ● ● ● Northcutt Google Ranking Factors (source) Backlinko Google Ranking Factors (source) Moz Search Engine Ranking Factors (source) Google's Top 3 Ranking Factors: Content, Links & Rank. Brain Patrick Stox @patrickstox | JR Oakes @jroakes

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