What are Search Rankings?
Google search rankings are a curious thing. They are the factors that affect where your page sits in the search results. Studying and implementing these is what SEO is all about.
Google doesn’t exactly publish what the rankings are, and it’s likely that the bulk of the actual “ranking and filing” work is mostly automated now. It’s more machine than man at this stage. Nevertheless, we believe there are about 200 ranking factors that go into the mix. Most of these appear to have a relatively low weighting factor in the search algorithm and therefore aren’t of concern to most websites out there.
Google’s Contribution to Search Engines
Google's original top ranking factor, and what allowed them to excel in the search engine business, is backlinks. These are web links back to your site. Search engines used to rank sites primarily based on the amount of traffic they received. Google changed the game by adding the measurement of backlinks into its algorithm. This meant websites that had more “citations”, presumably due to the quality of their content, were given a rankings boost.
Fast forward to today and the algorithm has evolved through many iterations, many minor and some major. It is believed that human moderators are making countless minor tweaks, around the clock. Adding this to the automation aspect, it’s fair to consider the search algorithm to be more of a living ecosystem than a simple mathematical function.
The Top Google Search Ranking Factors
Comprehensive content
Backlinks to your site
The way we in the industry learn about what’s important and what’s not is by running large scale studies to determine from our own data what moves the needle and by how much. Luckily, we have amazing SEO resources like Backlinko, to take on this epic task.
A Summary of Their Key Findings
Our data shows that a site’s overall link authority (as measured by Ahrefs Domain Rating) strongly correlates with higher rankings.
Pages with lots of backlinks rank above pages that don’t have as many backlinks. In fact, the #1 result in Google has an average of 3.8x more backlinks than positions #2-#10.
Comprehensive content with a high “Content Grade” (via Clearscope), significantly outperformed content that didn’t cover a topic in-depth.
We found no correlation between page loading speed (as measured by Alexa) and first page Google rankings.
Getting backlinks from multiple different sites appear to be important for SEO. We found the number of domains linking to a page had a correlation with rankings.
The vast majority of title tags in Google exactly or partially match the keyword that they rank for. However, we found essentially zero correlation between using a keyword in your title tag and higher rankings on the first page.
Page authority (as measured by Ahrefs URL Rating) weakly correlates with rankings.
We discovered that word count was evenly distributed among the top 10 results. The average Google first page result contains 1,447 words.
HTML page size does not have any correlation with rankings. In other words, heavy pages have the same chance to rank as light pages.
We found a very slight correlation between URL length and rankings. Specifically, short URLs tend to have a slight ranking advantage over longer URLs.
Our data shows that use of Schema markup does not correlate with higher rankings.
Websites with above-average “time on site” tend to rank higher in Google. Specifically, increasing time on site by 3 seconds correlates to ranking a single position higher in the search results.