Ranking Factors in Google for 2011 Has Changed - Read More Here

In Google ranking factors, you’ll find the traditional list of factors broken down into sections such as domain level keyword usage features (which describe things like exact match domains, using the keyword in the root or subdomain name, etc) or page level link metrics (which refer to items like quantity of links to the page, mozRank, etc).

So Rather than showing the old 0-5 importance scale along with the “degree of consensus” calculated on standard deviation, we’re trying this new format, which highlights relative importance of metrics in a single section based on the aggregation of the voters’ ordering. Those elements that are very high on the “influence value” tended to be consistently rated as more important that features below them. The degree of difference between influence values shows, on the 100-point scale, how much the average of the votes differed. In this manner, we hope to illustrate the average of voters’ opinions in a simple, visual chart.

Enjoy the data and please help me in giving huge thanks to our 132 voters, who put in tireless hours going through the survey process.

p.s. For those interested in comparisons, the old 2009 ranking factors is now here (though, methodology and presentation of data is quite different, so a 1:1 may not be entirely fair).

Read the full article here:
New Edition of the Ranking Factors for 2011 is Now Live!

Ranking Factors in Google for 2011 Has Changed - Read More Here

In Google ranking factors, you’ll find the traditional list of factors broken down into sections such as domain level keyword usage features (which describe things like exact match domains, using the keyword in the root or subdomain name, etc) or page level link metrics (which refer to items like quantity of links to the page, mozRank, etc).

So Rather than showing the old 0-5 importance scale along with the “degree of consensus” calculated on standard deviation, we’re trying this new format, which highlights relative importance of metrics in a single section based on the aggregation of the voters’ ordering. Those elements that are very high on the “influence value” tended to be consistently rated as more important that features below them. The degree of difference between influence values shows, on the 100-point scale, how much the average of the votes differed. In this manner, we hope to illustrate the average of voters’ opinions in a simple, visual chart.

Read the full article here:
New Edition of the Ranking Factors for 2011 is Now Live!

Query Volume Can It Directly Influence Rankings?

There are plenty of ways of trying to get lots of people to carry out searches that you want them to. For many companies, offline advertising spend can be used to create huge volume, these days you often see on TV adverts things like “search used cars Seattle to find us” or even “search for Samsung TV’s”. Both of these examples are aimed specifically at moderating search behavior and getting people to perform fairly specific searches.

Most of us however do not have access to TV levels of budget, and even if we did convincing the marketing director to allow you, as an SEO, to have a say in the direct response messaging of the spot is a bit tough.

Luckily there are other ways of achieving it, Rand has experimented for some time with driving tweets to google results pages, and his followers (currently running at over 35,000) regularly click through to the google results, and then click on the one that he intended. While I don’t think he has ever said that this was to play with both CTR and search volume, it’s a perfect potential methodology.

Another really easy way to generate searches is by using your newsletter mailing list. If you have, say 100,000 people in your email list, try a few emails where you are sending them to a search result where you know you rank well rather than direct to your site.

Read the full article here:

Whoa… Can Query Volume Directly Influence Rankings?

Robot Access & Indexation Restriction Techniques Can Lead To Better Ranking

Today, I’m covering robot control technique conflicts. In an effort to REALLY get their point across, webmasters will sometimes implement more than one robot control technique to keep the search engines away from a page. Unfortunately, these techniques can sometimes contradict each other: One technique hides the instruction of the other or link juice is lost.

There are a number of tools at our disposal that allow us to make the most of bot activity on a website such as the meta robots tag, robots.txt, x-robots-tag, canonical tag and others.

The canonical tag is a page level meta tag that is placed in the HTML header of a webpage.

Choose the best method for the scenario and back away from the machine. You’ll be much better off.

Read the full article here:
Robot Access & Indexation Restriction Techniques: Avoiding Conflicts