Keyword Use Factors

The following components relate to the use of the user's search query terms in determining the rank of a particular page.

EGOL

Gets bolded in the SERPS and is a heavy hitter in optimization.

Andy Hagans

This title tag has consistently been the most important on-page SEO factor for the past few years.

Russ Jones

Most important for CTR in SERPS, but generally the most powerful HTML tag you have at your disposal. I chose moderately weighted because of the duplicate content issues. A good title tag can help a little, a bad title tag can ruin a page.

Christine Churchill

If you have time to do only one SEO action on your site, take the time to create good titiles.

Elisabeth Osmeloski

Not only is it one of your strongest chances to impact rankings, it is undoubtedly your BEST chance to convert a searcher to a visitor within the SERPS. Get the click, get the conversion.

Chris Boggs

We have seen great and rapid results modifying the keyword use in the title, especially for large branded sites that already have thousands of IBLs. Again, with everything, this is also dependent on the word's usage within content and IBLs. Additionaly, the "prominence" of the keyword (closer to the begining) seems to help incrementally, espcially with sites that agree to place their brand name after the kw.

Scottie Claiborne

Critical to good optimization.

Eric Ward

Moreso for news search than web search, and especially if the news engine has decided your source is trustworthy. For older sites, yes, for new sites, not right away.

Neil Patel

I have played around by removing and adding keywords within the Title Tag and have noticed a few bumps in search results.

Aaron Wall

If it is overdone it can actually supress a site's rankings, but if the site is well mixed and the titles look more like descriptive newspaper titles than overt SEO it helps a lot. Plus many people link at documents by their official names, and thus the title acts as anchor text for viral content.

Thomas Bindl

Title tag is the strongest on-page factor when it comes down to SEO as it influences the ranking itself as well as CTR on the SERPs

Mike McDonald

If I had to pick only one single aspect of a page to change/optimize, it would be the title tag.

Michael Gray

Having the singular or plural form of the keyword(s) is beneficial.

Ben Pfeiffer

One of the most important but often neglected on page factors.

Guillaume

One of the big 3, and why on Earth does a unique meta Title still exist in top tier companies? Are they are really really dumb or what?

Marcus Tandler

definetly carrys some weight, and also helps you CTR

Jill Whalen

Probably one of the most important factors in determining rankings.

Ani Kortikar

use relevant keywords and text

Caveman

One of the single most important things a site owner can do to affect rankings. Yet, I've rarely met a site with well-deployed titles sitewide. Most underappreciated aspect of page titles: The importance of a sitewide strategy to maximize keyword coverage, clarify distinctions between similar pages, and avoid duplication and dampening filters.

Todd Malicoat

Good titles assist clickthrough (which is likely a portion of current algorithms), and titles still play a very important role in identifying the content portions of a site, and thus the terms that they rank for. Title tags are one of the first areas that nearly anyone claiming to be an SEO will check

Rae Hoffman

I still think the title tag is one of the most important on page elements from an algo perspective as well as a click through perspective.

Roger Montti aka martinibuster

When even the Googlers are recommending proper use of the title tag, it's probably counterproductive to do otherwise. But then there are nuances to it, like avoiding the use of keywords that might turn off your relevance for a pet keyword. Considering the randomization of reasons why a page may take a particular position in a SERP, you can't say with certainty how exactly to seed keywords into the title tag is correct. Pretty much all of the methods are valid.

Scottie Claiborne

It is important to use the keyword phrase throughout the page where it makes sense. As engines get more sophisticated, it's not just the targeted keyword phrase that counts, but the mix of all the words on the page that help to determine what the page is about.

Aaron Wall

If it is overdone it can suppress rankings. I think they are moving more toward topic analysis to learn what is relevant though.

Michael Gray

It is possible to rank pages without the text being on the page, but it requires a lot more effort from domain trust/authority, internal and external anchor text if it's not.

Jonah Stein

Keywords in the title need to included on the page. Long tail keywords in the page can appear in SERP even when they are no where else. Keyword density is over rated.

Eric Ward

Again, there's always an "if". If the site has earned trust previously, if the text validates the subject matter, if the IBLs indicate quality, then sure, trust on site body copy.

Barry Welford

Particularly in the starting and ending paragraphs

Neil Patel

If you are writing about "dogs" then you should naturally use keywords related to "dogs" within your content. If you don't have keywords within your content it can become hard to rank for those terms.

Russ Jones

Once again, better to than not to, but hardly any value.

Thomas Bindl

content is king

Mike McDonald

Occurrences of your keyword in your actual body text. What a novel concept. Of course it matters.

Ben Pfeiffer

Essential for search engines to determine the relevance of the site.

Guillaume

I think it becomes relevant in terms of how long people will be staying on the page, so down the road it affects SERPs greatly.

Marcus Tandler

With the new "anti-google-bomb" filter it probably carries a little more weight then before

Jill Whalen

You certainly should be using the keyword phrases you'd like to rank highly for in your body text as that definitely is a key place to determine relevancy.

Elisabeth Osmeloski

Having a page focused tightly on one or two main themes is always recommended over having a schizophrenic (sp?) page of body text.

Chris Boggs

Use of semantic variations and less focus on keyword density seems to be key. Go "naturelle!"

Caveman

How could it not be one of the strongest indicators of page subject matter (when aggregated on a Web-wide basis)? If the keywords on a page include "citrus, limes, lemons, tangerines and oranges" it's a good bet the page is NOT about oil and gas drilling. :P

Todd Malicoat

Rather than worrying about density, or other such myths, it is likely better to just use the words associated with topics. The use of semantically similar words is much more important than repeating the same word (which likely HURTS more than helps these days).

Rae Hoffman

I don't think repeating your keywords over and over is going to give you any benefit. But I do think including your keywords and natural variations (think LSI) in natural conversation is something people should focus on when writing content. Also depends on the engine.

Roger Montti aka martinibuster

Not just the keywords you use, but the keywords you're not using.

Eric Ward

Strongly weighted once overall site is trusted.

Aaron Wall

Using semantically related terms allows you to help associate your page with other topical pages and helps your page rank for many long tail keywords.

Wil Reynolds

This should also coincide with the theme of the links pointing to the site.

Marcus Tandler

I think this will become more important in the future

Chris Boggs

Seems as if the engines are enjoying more variations of the keyword and semantic equivalents, as recently tested.

Jonah Stein

Natural writing that include stems and semantically related concepts is important.

Barry Welford

Semantic analysis means that related words and synonyms all contribute to the ranking.

Russ Jones

I have seen no substantial evidence to convince me that the surrounding language measurably affects the ranking of a page.

Thomas Bindl

without on-topic content it's a lot harder to rank

Guillaume

Hey - it's all about relevance!

Jill Whalen

Not exactly sure what you mean by this one. How is this different than using keyword phrases in the body text?

Caveman

If this means text that is of no concern with respect to ranking, it's only important that there is some variation and separation of keywords. (Dense, cloaked, keyword stuffed documents still rank well, even in Google). But more importantly, pages attempting to rank well for competitive keywords have far greater success when terms commonly found occurring with the core keywords are also present. This dates back to at least Google's Allegra Update (IMO), and possibly even the Florida Update, when patterns of keyword occurrence and citation patterns came more to the fore.

Todd Malicoat

Using the RIGHT combination of keywords is more important than repetition. For more on this topic - do some research of the purchase of the "applied semantics" corporation.

Roger Montti aka martinibuster

Some keywords will trigger associations you may not want Google to make.

Eric Ward

Depends on the topic of the site and the word in the tag. Having a site about industrial washers with a <H1>Britney Spears</H1> tag is not going to help.

Aaron Wall

May hurt your rankings if it is too well aligned with the page title and anchor text. If templating issues cause too much duplication in a large section of a website it may also lead to reduced crawling.

Ben Pfeiffer

Not as important as it once was as a ranking factor, but still necessary on a well optimized page and very useful for organizing page content.

Jill Whalen

Keywords H tags in and of themselves don't seem to really matter as my tests have shown that positions don't seem to change whether the headline is wrapped in an H tag or not.

Russ Jones

In my opinion, the second most important HTML tag available.

Thomas Bindl

2nd most important on-page criteria

Mike McDonald

This is so easily gamed through the use of stylesheets that it probably shouldn't be a factor but I suspect it is. It makes sense from a crawler's point of view. This text has been designated a more emphatic font, hence is probably more important.

Guillaume

Help organize the content (so they say...)

Marcus Tandler

Definetly a big helper, when used properly and not too generous across a page

Chris Boggs

If it helps to further support the page's title and the IBL anchor text. using it alone without having IBLs using it will likely not give too much boost.

Caveman

Best used to reinforce a page's most important theme. Exact duplication between title, META Description and H1 can cause trouble. We have tons of highly ranking pages with NO Hx tags at all.

Todd Malicoat

I can't imagine h1 tags having very much weight anymore - they're good practice for coding valid CSS, and seperating form from function. Good to use, but not a whole lot of value on their own.

Roger Montti aka martinibuster

It's a good use of HTML. But it may be counterweighted by other things going on and off the page.

Jonah Stein

If your nicesly aged, non-hyphenated domain name contains your primary keyword, your 25% of the way to the top...10.

Scottie Claiborne

Using a keyword in the domain name is only helpful if you separate the words with hyphens. General speculation is that too many hyphens might trigger a trust issue with the domain, so more than one or two hyphens is not recommended. A good brand name is always better than a keyword-filled domain.

Aaron Wall

If the domain name is an exact match I believe it is strongly weighted because it might be a sign of a navigational query. Plus having an exact match domain means their were either early to their topic (and thus perhaps a topical leader), or they may have paid a domainer nosebleed prices for the domain.

Mike McDonald

I don't see how having a domain consisting of (or containing) one of your primary keywords could be a bad thing. One of the precious few consensus opinions in SEO is the importance of link text. That said, I don't think there is much (if any) value if the keyword is one of 50 hyphenated keywords stuck in front of a .net.

Barry Schwartz

But the key is that people will link to you by your domain name. So if you sell Blue Widgets and your domain is www.bluewidgets.com, people are more likely to link to you as "Blue Widgets" than if you had the name rustybrick.com. :)

EGOL

That domain name will be used for a lot of your backlinks. Having your KW as your biz name will get you great anchor text links. Not using a domain with your KW will cost you a lot of relevant anchor text. Outside of the algo here is an example why you should buy the KW.com for your turf if you can get your hands on it. Makes you an authority even if undeserved - how valuable is that when you are asking for a link? It makes you THE MAN for that turf - how valuable is that when a customer is on your site. And can provide enormous psychological energy and you should never underrate that! Also looks great in the SERPs and might get you a few extra clicks.

Andy Hagans

This is only of importance when the domain name is an exact match for the keyword phrase; i.e., it's very easy to rank keywordphrase.com or keywordphrase.org for [keyword phrase], however it won't necessarily give keywordphrase.com a bonus for [keyword phrase + modifier]

Eric Ward

Once upon a time, maybe, and for certain types of content maybe still. It depends on the content, the source, and the trust earned previously.

Eric Enge

The influence of this one is microscopic. Main value is to help the use understand what your site is about.

Neil Patel

This doesn't prove that it is important, but if you do a search on Google you will notice domains with keywords bolded.

Russ Jones

Not much weight except in nascent, untapped niches. Does play a good role in CTR from the SERP, though. (keyword highlighting in the title, snippet, and url are great boosts) It can have value when the keyword is a copyrighted term, however. (ie: the only domain with the keyword in it is yours)

Thomas Bindl

Importance is mainly due to the keyword in links when people use the domain name as anchor text.

Michael Gray

Having an exact match for a domain name and keyword is important. Having a partial match isn't. http://www.bluewidgets.com - good http://www.cheapbluewidgets.com - bad

Ben Pfeiffer

Makes a hell of a website to have your target keywords in the domain. Acts as an overall contributor to rankings by means of other rankings factors. Keywords in domain are used extensively in linking, titles, urls, etc..

Guillaume

Being a fairly new SEO'er, I'd say that from all the stories I've heard compared to my actual experimentations, I'd say this has little value if you try to do white-hat, but could be more effective with massive link campaign / spamming (while getting you flagged!)

Lucas Ng (aka shor)

Not from Google itself, but you will get some pages linking to you using your domain's keywords, so there is that benefit.

Marcus Tandler

The only advantage of a keyword in a domain name is, that when you get linked at just with your URL, you have the keyword in the anchortext.

Jill Whalen

Much less weight than many people believe, it's more of an indirect weighting due to the URL sometimes being used as the anchor text. Definitely not the key to high rankings as some seem to think.

Ani Kortikar

Advantage is having natural links reflect positively for keyword rankings, but it is becoming more difficult to get right keywords.

Natasha Robinson

Seems to be more important in Yahoo however guess this should be Google focused, no?

Chris Boggs

Coupled with use in the page Title and on-page content, this is a factor. Having the word in the URL alone will likely not help without some support.

Caveman

Not very important in terms of algo weighting. Factor in backlink anchor text and SERP click-through's, etc., and it is clearly important. I would probably not launch a new brand today without owning the brand name as a domain.

Todd Malicoat

Keywords in domains has come full circle to play an increased role in rankings. My speculative side says that it's to counteract the problems caused by increased trust filters to assist sites in ranking for their brand names. The consequence is that exact match keyword domains do exceptionally well assuming they have no dashes in them.

Rae Hoffman

I think this also depends on the engine. You'll see a lot more benefit from a domain using keywords in MSN than you will in Google.

Roger Montti aka martinibuster

I belive there is some advantage in having the non-hyphenated version of the domain, especially in conjunction with trust factors such as age, quality of links, and other factors. That said, a look at the SERPs makes it abundantly clear there are far more importanct factors at play. So don't expect a good domain to be a shortcut. It's not. You still have to do the grunt work.

Barry Schwartz

Having them bolded in the search results are worth a lot in my opinion.

Aaron Wall

Not weighted anywhere near as much as an exact match domain name, but helps improve CTR (and thus relevancy if CTR factors into relevancy scores) and some people will link to pages using the URL as anchor text.

Ben Pfeiffer

Works very well in Yahoo. Great for user navigation and still worth while to do as a basic SEO methodology. Use hyphens.

Jonah Stein

Information Architecture plays a large role in establishing themes.

Scottie Claiborne

This only influences rankings where you have many sites linking to that page using the URL as the anchor text. This isn't seen very often as most sites use your site name or a descriptive phrase as anchor text. It doesn't hurt to do it, but I would never change a page that is already indexed just so that you can add keywords in the URL.

Eric Ward

Again, depends on the content, the source, and the trust earned previously.

Eric Enge

The influence of this one is microscopic. Main value is to help the use understand what your site is about.

Russ Jones

Dependent upon a number of factors including the number of words, dashes and slashes. Also good, though, for CTR (as mentioned above)

Wil Reynolds

Remember this also helps people know what a page in their history is about.

Thomas Bindl

Importance is mainly due to the keyword in links when people use the URL as anchor text.

Mike McDonald

Similar to the domain name, I think it's always a good thing to have your keywords associated with your address. If someone is going to link to your page, they will by default be linking to your page using one of your keywords.

Guillaume

I've seen very little effect on that

Lucas Ng (aka shor)

Not from Google itself, but you will get some pages linking to that page using your URL keywords, so there is that benefit.

Marcus Tandler

Matt himself recently said in a blogpost, that the keyword in a page´s URL might help a little - quote: "Most bloggy sites tend to have words from the title of a post in the url; having keywords from the post title in the url also can help search engines judge the quality of a page."

Jill Whalen

Same comments as keywords in domains.

Ani Kortikar

dont overdo it.

Chris Boggs

Even Matt Cutts said this helps. ;) Again though, this is dependent on other factors such as the page content as well as IBL anchor text.

Caveman

Is G helped by seeing that a file has been named "large-long-widgets"? Of course. Even spammers won't often name files in a way unrelated to page contents. The only reason it's not more important, is *because* spammers name files according to page contents. ;-)

Todd Malicoat

It certainly doesn't hurt, and provides bolded listings on many search results which assists clickthrough rates. It is good practice, but likely only has marginal value by itself.

Rae Hoffman

Again, depends on the search engine. I think algo wise it carries some importance, but isn't "needed". That said, I think having a page named something that clearly says to users "this is about the topic your looking for!" may help increase CTR for the ranks you *do* have.

Roger Montti aka martinibuster

I'm not certain that it helps all that much. Having one keyword in the URL is probably fine. Two keywords, might help the organic CTR (for rankings it's debatable). Beyond that I think the likelihood of a URL looking spammy goes way up.

Aaron Wall

May hurt your rankings if it is too well aligned with the page title and anchor text. If templating issues cause too much duplication in a large section of a website it may also lead to reduced crawling.

Thomas Bindl

2nd most important on-page criteria (weight changes every now and then and it can happen that h2/h3 have the same/higher importance than h1

Mike McDonald

Similar to H1 tags. Font styles and emphasis would ideally be an objective judgment on the importance of a word or phrase. Search engines aren't stupid though. They know about css and I would be surprised if the abuse of these types of tags didn't set off flags of some sort.

Eric Ward

Same as above

Russ Jones

Same logic as with meta keywords, they at least play some role, although little.

Marcus Tandler

Great for targeting accompanying keyword phrases to a main keyword

Jill Whalen

See comments for H1 tag.

Chris Boggs

This may be helpful for less popular long tailed terms, but then again just having those in the content may be enough. Sometimes it seems to have proven helpful for geographic emphasis, it seems (including the geo location of offices in the "about" or "location" pages as a sub-header for each office).

Caveman

We rarely bother. I know, I know...sorry purists. ;-)

Todd Malicoat

Same as h1 tags - good practice. Smart thing to use, but they're not going to help you rank for "home loans".

Roger Montti aka martinibuster

It's a good use of HTML. But it may be counterweighted by other things going on and off the page. If you're going to use statistical averages, it may turn out that the more structured the page the more likely it's going to be created by someone trying to manipulate the system.

Andy Hagans

This is very important for Image search, but not as important for Web search.

Scottie Claiborne

When an image is used in place of anchor text, the alt acts as anchor text. Alt attributes for linked images do have some importance when it comes to SEO. Alt attributes on regular images are important for usability (think mobile devices and screen readers) but not for SEO.

Natasha Robinson

In Google Local listings, I've actually found some sites ranking for words that only appear in ALT tags and Image titles of that site.

Jonah Stein

If you use the images for links, the alt tag is as important as the anchor text. Also, image search delivers some traffic, so tag them anyway.

Eric Ward

Shouldn't really, if it does at all, unless (see 'circle of trust' above)

Barry Welford

That applies to the Alt tags. The Image Titles have no influence.

Neil Patel

Images should contain alts and titles. It helps describe what the image is all about.

Aaron Wall

Important for helping images rank, but not as important for helping a page link, unless the image is a hyperlink, in which case the alt text acts similar to anchor text.

Russ Jones

I would put this on par with keyword in the body.

Mike McDonald

Search engine spiders can't tell what your cool graphics are without them. If your graphics are themed with the keywords/phrases/concepts of your page (and why wouldn't they be?)... all the better.

Christine Churchill

Alt tags are good for the users and since Google is all about improving the user experience, alt tags may have some minor influence. The problem is alt tags are easy to abuse, so I imagine the weight factor on this is pretty low.

Michael Gray

Alt tags and title tags confer some internal anchor text value, not as much as pure text but are helpful.

Ben Pfeiffer

Alt tags really hold the most impact and act as anchor text for externally or internally linked images.

Debra Mastaler

the bold, H1, description tag, etc hey - something has to make up those 100 factors used to determine rank.

Guillaume

I'd make sure those things are dynamically generated so you don't waste time optimizing them.

Marcus Tandler

Only when used for an image with a link, where this will be the links anchortext

Jill Whalen

Practically as good as anchor text for clickable images.

Chris Boggs

Must be combined with other factors to help, such as the image being a link to an on-topic page or other image.

Caveman

For ranking a page? Not of any use, and overuse may be an issue. For ranking images, grossly underappreciated. There's more traffic in image search across some categories than most people realize. One of the closest things on the Web to free traffic.

Todd Malicoat

Images that are linked have their alt text used as anchor text. This is VERY often overlooked by even sharp folks that run websites. Alt text on theair own (unlinked) is great for accessibility, but not that important for direct search rankings.

Rae Hoffman

Again, depends on the engine. Alt tags and Image titles should be usedfor their intended purpose, to describe the image that appears in that spot. If you can get a keyword in there, great, but as a base, you simply want to describe what a user would see if they didn't have images off.

Roger Montti aka martinibuster

It's a good practice to use these as benefits the sight impaired.

Scottie Claiborne

Setting words apart from the rest of the text indicates that you think they are important- it makes sense that those words would get a little more attention in the analysis of the page.

Ben Pfeiffer

Has some weight as a ranking factor, but not very much. Effective usage might lie in what type of tag you use, but its still undetermined. Bolds are for markup, strong is for emphasis. I generally use strong tags and highlight 3-5 keyphrases on a page in slight variations.

Jill Whalen

I haven't seen real evidence to show this as being a factor.

Eric Ward

Shouldn't really, if it does at all, unless (see 'circle of trust' above)

Russ Jones

Same as <h(x>1)> tags. (ie h3)

Guillaume

I'm still doing it sometimes, but I'm really starting to wonder why... Plus, it's not fun to read :/

Marcus Tandler

Again - great for targeting accompanying keyword phrases to a main keyword

Chris Boggs

Similar value to the H2, H3 depending on usage.

Caveman

Keyword Use in Bold/Strong Tags (comments)
We focus on communication to the user; we never bold terms in an effort to rank for them. Anyone can bold anything, even if it's not related much as a keyword to the page contents.

Todd Malicoat

Bold tags are great for catching readers that scan, and getting them to spend more time on a page. If that is an indirect benefit of using bolding then I suppose it could be considered beneficial

Rae Hoffman

Same as keyword in domain - you'll see much more result from this behavior in MSN than you will in Google.

Roger Montti aka martinibuster

I'm not a big fan of this. Isn't this Google SEO 1.2?

Scottie Claiborne

A good description can help influence users to click on a listing. The meta description is still used as the site description for many smaller directories and engines.

Danny Sullivan

And yet, so important for display purposes.

Ben Pfeiffer

Descriptions are important. Need to be unique for each page and contain target keywords to encourage search engines to pull snippets from it. Make it interesting!

Barry Schwartz

Important for the site command to return unique pages, outside of that, it is easy to add, so do it.

EGOL

Might not influence rankings but will bet a little bolding when your description tag is grabbed for the SERPs.

Jonah Stein

BUT DESCRIPTIONS ARE ESSENTIAL FOR SEM...the use of a unique title is essential to avoid keyword duplication issues and a descriptive title is important for Clickthrough.

Eric Ward

buy viagra buy viagra buy viagra buy viagra... (That is, unless the page is ten years old and already in the famed circle of trust, then they can help.

Eric Enge

used for search engine results descriptions though.

Neil Patel

More than using keywords within meta description tags, I feel it is more important to have unique meta description tags on every page. It seems lots of people like using generic descriptions or none at all.

Aaron Wall

If done well it helps improve CTR by making your listings look more appealing. May hurt your rankings if it is too well aligned with the page title.

Russ Jones

Once again, CTR in the SERPS. Definitely more important that the keywords meta tag, and extremely important for preventing duplicate content issues. Similar to titles, a bad description can kill a page.

Wil Reynolds

The most important thing is contactly upding the meta description with Free Shipping, Buy one Get one, New Whitepaper and other calls to action to get you to get more clickthroughs for the rankings you have achieved.

Thomas Bindl

Mainly useful for CTR on SERPs

Mike McDonald

I think a good description is important because it will sometimes be used as your result summary. That said, while having keywords present is important I feel that a description is better geared towards soliciting an action from a person - not so much spiders..

Michael Gray

keywords and meta tags play very little role in rankings. However if they are being used giving each page unique KW's and meta tags is important. it's better to have nothing, than use something that is duplicated across a large portion of other pages.

Guillaume

It's one of the major thing to optimize for CTR in organic listings... I've seen great influence, especially when you get to the top5 of the SERPs

Lucas Ng (aka shor)

Neglect these at your peril. May not help you rank but sure as hell helps a user clickthrough to your site.

Marcus Tandler

Probably doesn´t really help improve your rankings, but can definetly help with the CTR again

Jill Whalen

Most major search engines do index the words in this tag, therefore they must be given some weight. It's real importance lies in its ability to allow you to have a bit more control over what appears in the SERP for your listing.

Ani Kortikar

avoid spamming. natural variations are better than identical tags.

Natasha Robinson

While not the biggest of ranking factors, it does play a large role in click-thru rates.

Chris Boggs

This is most important from a UX experience, so long as the descritpion is used by the SE for that keyword search result. We have seen little direct influence on ranking, but the value of additional click-throughs makes it something to strongly consider implementing.

Caveman

Best used for word forms and thematic reinforcement, especially in Google. Important that the Description does not precisely mirror the page TITLE. Make sure that META Descriptions reflect what's on the actual page. Hugely important for click-through's (which may affect also rankings).

Todd Malicoat

Fractional at best - though having identical description tags can create duplicate content issues. It's best to use meta descriptions just to control what your snippet says on SE results.

Rae Hoffman

I don't think it matters much algo wise, I think it does matter CTR wise.

Roger Montti aka martinibuster

Might not influence ranking, but it sure influences CTR in organic positions. An interesting place to throw in alternative/synonymous phrases.

Barry Schwartz

Only Yahoo and I doubt they use it much.

Natasha Robinson

Works for mispellings in Yahoo (Ha, I spelled "mispellings" wrong) - And this is about Google.

EGOL

Do it just in case.

Jonah Stein

Google ignores them

Scottie Claiborne

Useless, IMO.

Eric Ward

buy cialis buy cialis buy cialis....ditto

Danny Sullivan

And, of course, only for Yahoo.

Neil Patel

A lot of search engines just ignore this tag.

Russ Jones

Almost no value, but two pages with gibberish for content, one with a real keyword in a meta keywords tag, the other without... The one with the keyword will rank above. Which weigh's more, an anvil, or an anvil with a feather?

Thomas Bindl

Could not see any influence in Google lately

Mike McDonald

I think some less sophisticated directories and possibly even a few search engines might still look at this tag - but not many- and the few that do likely don't give it a lot of weight (unless they're really dumb)

Ben Pfeiffer

Worthless. Even more worthless for misspellings.

Guillaume

Just so boring to fill simply for wacky engines that will bring 1 visitor every century.

Lucas Ng (aka shor)

On a similar note, it will also be interesting to see what, if anything, Google does with microformats.

Jill Whalen

Doesn't influence rankings at all in Google which doesn't index the information provided within it. Is fractionally weighted with Yahoo, but should only help if there are no other pages indexed that actually use the words in more important areas of the site.

Elisabeth Osmeloski

i do believe it is spot-checked for matching up with a page's content or other SEO elements.

Chris Boggs

Maybe somewhere other than Google. ;)

Caveman

Probably more useful in finding spam than in ranking pages. We bother only because there's still a chance that they matter slightly. Sometimes we use them to mess with competition.

Todd Malicoat

Meh. This is so '98. If someone mentions writing all your keywords in meta tags you should probably run from them screaming "spammer" at the top of your lungs.

Rae Hoffman

I don't think this counts for anything these days, but I still always recommend they are included and include them on my own commercial sites... it's classification, can't hurt you and simply good practice.

Roger Montti aka martinibuster

Sometimes I wonder if having this tag in there might count against you, at least for a fraction of a point. If I were turning the knobs I'd make it worthy of raising at least one eyebrow on an algo cruncher somewhere.

Page Attributes

The following elements comprise how the Google interprets specific data about a webpage independent of keywords

Eric Ward

If seen this be the sole driver of positon 1 rankings, but I've also seen it have zero influence at all. It's about reputationi.

Neil Patel

Without the proper linking structure, certain pages may not get enough emphasis. For example with Pronet pages with links directly from the homepage usually do really well.

Lucas Ng (aka shor)

In industries with an extremely long tail and a low SERP competitiveness, the internal link popularity will become a factor in ranking deep content pages.

Chris Boggs

Have seen multiple examples of top rankings for competitive keywords with only inbound links pointed to it. Cannot forget to use anchor text links within the content when applicable, which incrementally boost the Navigation link's value, IMO.

Barry Schwartz

You control this, so go after it.

Jonah Stein

Depends on the size of the site versus the PR. Post big-daddy, some sites do not get spidered entirely, so internal linking can be essential.

Scottie Claiborne

This is one of the most overlooked aspects of optimization- the internal linking and structure of a site.

Barry Welford

Only slightly less important than comparable links from external web pages.

Aaron Wall

Internal links can really drive a page, but if the internal anchor text is too well aligned with the anchor text, page title, and headings that might suppress rankings for the target keyword.

Russ Jones

As mentioned on my blog, you can pulse a page's rankings by including and excluding links to it from your home page.

Wil Reynolds

How a site is architected (in terms of heirarchy) is a critical component to site design / SEO.

Mike McDonald

Very important and often misunderstood and/or taken for granted. You should do this with some thought. You don't want to link to every page from every other page. Props to <a href="http://www.seobook.com/archives/002021.shtml">Aaron Wall</a>

Debra Mastaler

Less now than before. Darnit.

Guillaume

A key element lots of big companies lack

Joost de Valk

The holy grail... Internal link structures are SO often overlooked.

Marcus Tandler

still carries some weight - that´s why old & crusty trusted sites can rank for almost anything

Jill Whalen

This is a key ingredient.

Ani Kortikar

This is one of the underutilized aspects of site optimization , especially for large sites. Careful analysis of what is the desired end result should lead to appropriate internal link strucutre.

Caveman

Link Popularity within the Site's Internal Link Structure (comments)
Internal link juice is still critically important: The nature and quality of internal links to a page says a lot about the page. Factors include: Number of inbound links, importance (placement) of the inbound links within the linking pages, anchor text patterns, nav versus text links, and the content of linking pages.

Todd Malicoat

If you haven't figured out how optimize your site's internal anchor text "price is right style" (closest to the high bid without going over) - then it's time to start hunting for a new occupation.

Roger Montti aka martinibuster

This is the easiest thing to manipulate in terms of anchors. However, placing more importance on specific documents will increase it's overall importance and ranking. But that doesn't have to be a function of more anchors pointing to it. A sitewide of "pet keyword phrase" isn't going to be enough to push you to the top.

Jonah Stein

Rand, your letting the last SEO secret out of the bag. Shame on you :-)

Barry Welford

This relates to the whole concept of authority and hub websites. What's good for people should translate into value for the search engines.

Russ Jones

Anchor Text Tunneling... Site A => Site B => Site C if Site A links to Site B with the "widgets" keyword, and site B links to C with "widgets", there is added benefit.

Ben Pfeiffer

Yes, quite important for newer sites. Great things happen to those that share in the same group.

Eric Ward

Some sites with zero outbounds rank first, so it can't be a hard rule.

Aaron Wall

Your outbound links help define what community your site belongs in.

Mike McDonald

You can't be all things to all people. The search engines know this ( I suspect my mother told them).

Michael Gray

linking out to relevant trusted pages can be big help.

Debra Mastaler

Quantity still beats out quality in a lot of cases.

Lucas Ng (aka shor)

Let's look at a link neighbourhood - hmm... XYZ real estate website has zero outbound links and the majority of its neighbours have at least 200? Consider yourself flagged for an unnatural linking pattern :)

Marcus Tandler

Your outbound links are almost equally important then your inbound links

Jill Whalen

This has some importance in that if you link to spam sites, it could supposedly get you into trouble. This is one of those things I simply trust Google on as I've never tested it myself.

Ani Kortikar

link to quality external sites with relevant content surrounding why you are linking.

Chris Boggs

This seems to have risen in value over the last year.

Caveman

This is such a frequently discussed factor that smart SEO's almost don't want to hear about it anymore. It's still important. How does one judge the quality of a directory? An authority site? Outbound links matter. They can hurt you or help you ... because the choice is yours, not someone else's. Unfortunately, linking to quality sites has become such an overused tactic that getting wikipedia out of the tops three spots on most SERP's is going to be a problem.

Todd Malicoat

It's no longer the ONLY thing - but it's still quite important. A site cannot rank with content alone. A site CAN rank with links alone.

Rae Hoffman

Who you link to says a lot about who you are and what your topic is - especially in an engine like Google.

Roger Montti aka martinibuster

Quality is important. This is a no-brainer.

Aaron Wall

Older documents may be trusted more, especially if they are well cited and do not have many broken links in them. For blogs and news sites new documents may tend to have high PageRank values due to internal site structure. New documents may also be given a freshness boost.

Ben Pfeiffer

Fresh documents on a trusted site do get spidered more in the beginning. Domain age is more important than document age. Thus a document on an older more trusted site will rank better than one a newer site.

Marcus Tandler

with the recent update, Google seems to be rating this factor a little less, to prevent parasite hosting and piggybacking, but the age of a document, the age of the links and the domain itself, is still a very important factor.

Barry Schwartz

with diminishing returns...

Scottie Claiborne

Age seems to be playing more of a role than ever.

Eric Ward

If the document also sends other algorithmic signals of quality.

Thomas Bindl

Only linking

Michael Gray

older documents on trusted domains have more value.

Guillaume

Yeah, Google still ranks crappy old things that just can't get off the 1st spots :/

Joost de Valk

More dependent on the age of the links towards the document

Chris Boggs

Although we have had success with new documents on older domains.

Caveman

Important to Google, but not something worth worrying much about from an SEO perspective because it is dependent on so many other factors. Newer documents are more important to certain kinds of sites and searches. Older documents with good link equity may signal credibility. Older, weakly linked documents not frequently updated may signal lack of importance. Age, in conjunction with active update and link patterns, is almost certainly a plus.

Todd Malicoat

I like 'em old:)

Roger Montti aka martinibuster

The old trust factor.

Jonah Stein

Above a threshold, it doesn't matter, but pages with all flash and images rarely rank well.

Aaron Wall

If too many pages are near the exact size or similar in size to many spam documents it may seem like the document has a higher probability of being spam. Google has also been growing more stringent with what they are willing to let in their index by requiring a minimum PageRank threshold to allow documents in their primary index. Longer and more athoritative documents are better than breaking articles into many shorter pages.

Russ Jones

Very small. I have ranked too many sites with under 15 words on the page to believe it truly matters. I do believe, however, that in a competitive arena, it can be used.

Wil Reynolds

You don't need tons of content per page, but obviously you need something indexable. Due to the prevalence of the long tail, shorter pages with less content may miss out on several searches.

Mike McDonald

Indexable content is good.

Ben Pfeiffer

Don't go overboard.

Guillaume

Accessibility to spiders... that's kinda a no brainer

Marcus Tandler

I could image, that the SEs compare the whole array of sites ranking for a peticular term and then rate the sites based on the average level against each other. Could help deranking affiliate-landing-pages

Jill Whalen

The amount of content isn't really important. Sheer volume isn't useful.

Chris Boggs

This depends on how well the content is structured in relation to other relevant pages. Also, too much content on the page seems to still equal less stellar results. The old rule was 200 words but we feel that as few as 75-100 can now be effective, if supported by other pages.

Caveman

A "signals of quality" issue. It is not essential for a directory site to have lots of indexable contents per page. Absence of substantial indexable content misses an opportunity to score "points" with Google, but that can be overcome with other signals of quality (e.g., quality inbound links, quality outbound links, KW's that commonly appear together are all present, intelligent keyword deployment across TITLE, META's, Hx, etc.).

Todd Malicoat

I would venture a guess that the quality of the amount of indexable content as a ratio is more important than the total amount of indexable content.

Roger Montti aka martinibuster

It's a no-brainer to have indexable content but perhaps maintaining a sitemap on every page might not be the way to go about it.

Eric Enge

The document content is a huge factor in getting links, but is hard for an algorith to measure and weigh. So really I think external measurements are used by engines to meadure document quality.

Neil Patel

I am a strong believer that content is king. With good content comes great links.

Natasha Robinson

I wished it weighed more or many of those cut & paste spam/blog posts for viagra and real estate wouldn't rank so well.

Eric Ward

Strongly weighted once overall site is trusted.

Barry Welford

Scraper sites will not command the position their volume might suggest.

Wil Reynolds

Did not understand the question

Thomas Bindl

Could not see any evidence, only good for links.

Ben Pfeiffer

I don't think this could affect organic rankings yet, better Google or Y could use an algorithm to separate pages based on certain quality criteria for spam detection.

Guillaume

I haven't done much research on this, I guess you have to be close to the search engine people to figure it out!

Marcus Tandler

if SEs will ever do a good job on evaluating this algorithmically, it probably could become a defining factor, but right now -> no chance!

Jill Whalen

This is too subjective. What does quality mean and how would it be measured?

Chris Boggs

Content is still undoubtedly King, but needs that support from the court!

Caveman

Too abstract for comment, except to say that "quality" documents, in tandem with effective marketing efforts, increase chances for one-way in-bound links. Algorithmically, if one can rank a cloaked keyword pile of junk, then that more or less makes the point here, IMHO.

Todd Malicoat

If I was measuring relevancy in search, I would place a grade reading level on all topics and websites. This helps to seperate material written by a college graduate in journalism - and a scraper using markov chains much more effectively.

Roger Montti aka martinibuster

One can cite patents to justify saying Google can detect patterns of paraphrased content. But there is also a voting aspect that comes into play, possibly more realistic. People know good content when they see it and tend to link to it. So to isolate fake content you have to refine identifying fake linking. So it's a yes and no answer.

Eric Ward

Especially for niche authorities

Aaron Wall

Clear organization not only helps search engines understand how documents relate to each other, but also effectivley distributes your link authority.

Chris Boggs

As with above, the structure is important. However, each of the pages should be able to stand on their own merit.

Caveman

Within a site, document organization can be important to the extent that it helps G understand what a given page is about, and how it differs from similar pages. Many times I've seen pages mis-categorized, or not sharply enough distinguished from other internal pages, which led to a dampening of the page's rankings. On a page level, it's important to the extent that the most critical ideas and keywords should be more dominant and higher on the page.

Todd Malicoat

Information architecture as a whole is probably the most overlooked area of search optimization - why? because it's hard to recreate a site's architecture on the fly, and generally a BIG project that no one wants. This can be deemed quite important by helping to control the flow of DEEPLINKS - and encouraging deeplinking to subsections of a site.

Roger Montti aka martinibuster

It helps Google maintain a focus on what your pages are about. I tend to link similar topics together, and refrain from linking dissimilar ones. It's just a matter of keeping it simple for Google to know what your page is about. Introducing a non-related tangent is counterproductive.

Neil Patel

There are lot of pages on the web that are old and have not been updated, but they rank well for competitive terms. I think frequency of updates to a whole site is more important.

Mike McDonald

If your page hasn't updated since 1999... It may not rank as well as a similar page that updated yesterday. I feel pretty confident on that one.

Laura Lippay

This would have to be taken in context to the norm for a site and what makes the update frequency (or lack of) a flag. Consider the differences of content updates to a legitimate News site vs. a legitimate Pets site.

Jonah Stein

New content ranks well for some time, but so do older pages. This really depends on the vertical.

Eric Ward

I have a page I haven't touched in 8 years that ranks #1 for its key phrase, so for that particular page, the high rank is not because I did or didn't update it. OTOH, I see other sites where it does matter.

Aaron Wall

Some types of documents are frequently updated while others are rarely updated. Make sure your page matches your site's profile.

Russ Jones

This is a "things I believe but can't prove". Site's that constantly change content on a page have difficulty controlling several other on-page ranking factors (such as whether keywords occur in h1, strong, em, or even occur at all). I believe that if you were able to control this, and able to keep content updated, that the page would out rank the other.

Wil Reynolds

I think this is somewhat overrated, people developing scripts to randomize content may be a stretch, if you have legitimate updates, make them.

Ben Pfeiffer

More updates the better. Keep that content fresh.

Chris Boggs

Depending on niche. News sites obviously need to focus on this, while product pages may not need it at all as long as traffic and linking contunues to grow.

Caveman

Over-rated. G has ways of assessing historical and newsworthy data and associating rate of change with other qualitative factors. For example, they clearly do not expect a well-linked page on Wordsworth's poetry to change often or dramatically. Do what makes sense for each page.

Todd Malicoat

Unless you're CNN, have super high pagerank, or are shooting for keywords that have "news" and other such words (where up to the minute advice is imporant) - I don't really see frequent updates being important. It is likely considered as a factor - but in 9 cases out of 10 NOT updating is likely to be more beneficial (though not to the point of being paranoid about it).

Roger Montti aka martinibuster

with Google updating it's index so frequently, it doesn't hurt to keep throwing more wood in the fire to keep things hot.

Jonah Stein

Really important not to go beyond the fourth level.

Scottie Claiborne

While I have pages with up to seven "folders" in the URL, I would recommend less whenever possible. While I don't believe it influences rankings in any way, it can impact spiderability in some cases.

Ani Kortikar

keep it to less than 4

Eric Ward

Again, 'circle of trust' trumps poor directory structure.

Barry Welford

More is a negative factor.

Mike McDonald

<a href="http://ww.tmz.com/2007/03/02/slash-yes-the-guitarist-is-at-annas-funeral/">Trailing Slash</a>

Ben Pfeiffer

Do you mean deep content in subdirectories?

Debra Mastaler

KW in filenames!!

Guillaume

Above 2 or 3, you're getting on the edge

Joost de Valk

Strongly related to internal link structure of course.

Lucas Ng (aka shor)

Similar to the hierarchy of document flow, this should not have any influence on ranking.

Chris Boggs

Does not seem to be a factor, as long as the pages are accessible.

Caveman

This is a misnomer. It's not about the folder depth - it's about linking and page juice. A document with four trailing slashes that is well linked internally and from the homepage might be a killer page. Also, deeper pages are typically more narrowly focused, and can grab great long-tail traffic that converts well.

Todd Malicoat

Less than three is probably optimal. SE's can index DEEPLY - I would be surprised if this had much weight as a standalone variable - though it could possibly be viewed as a small indicator of where a page falls in a site's overall heirarchy.

Roger Montti aka martinibuster

That's why it's important to develop deep links, it levels everything out.

Scottie Claiborne

While it doesn't influence rankings, poor spelling and grammar can influence visitors- negatively! Misspellings are sometimes targeted for rankings- in which case it wouldn't be a misspelling but the targeted keyword phrase. ;-)

Wil Reynolds

Due to the advent of "did you mean" spelling corrections inputting misspellings has mattered less.

Mike McDonald

Please use spell check. Help make the Internet a better place for your children and your children's children. If everybody's using bad grammar and spelling it makes it too hard to spot the Diggers.

Jonah Stein

To quote Danny Sullivan from last time around, I am tempted to vote 5 to trick webmasters into writing well.

Eric Ward

Maybe if the search term used was "expert spelling resource sites" :)

Barry Welford

Mis-spellings may even help to pick up some of the 'long tail' searches.

Aaron Wall

I actually think having a few misspellings in a page makes it easier to rank because there are so many less legitimate pages using those misspellings. But if misspellings might cost credibility points with end users it might make sense to have a person make a misspelling in a page comment or in one of your inbound links.

Thomas Bindl

Content has to match targeted search terms

Ben Pfeiffer

Like my dad said, if you can't spell the target terms then you might as well not try to rank for them.

Guillaume

Yeah, you gotta make sure that you use da kind of language that yo kind of visitors are using too man

Joost de Valk

Having lots of spelling errors might make you look spammy... Ask Shoemoney :)

Lucas Ng (aka shor)

Accommodation? Accomodation? Acommodation? Acomodation? Mispelling is a Google Adwords industry in itself.

Chris Boggs

I would say this is weighted only in the way that this may cause less people to link to the content.

Caveman

Non issue for SEO ... unless all of your important KW's are misspealled. :P

Todd Malicoat

Poor speeling will likely reduce the qualitee of a docuaments reeding level - thus deecreesing the overal trust scor.

Rae Hoffman

Again, engine based. It does matter massively from a user standpoint though, so it should be done as practice.

Roger Montti aka martinibuster

I would penalize consistent spelling errors that occur sitewide. Grammar maybe less so.

Aaron Wall

If you can get designers to think that your stuff is better because it validates more of them will pay attention to you, subscribe to your feed, and link at your site. Otherwise, I believe validation is somewhat overhyped.

Mike McDonald

Validation? Please, oh please, make it go away. Validation zealots just plain freak me out. Walking under ladders, breaking mirrors and stepping on cracks probably has more influence on your SERPs than validation.

Lucas Ng (aka shor)

Adam Lasnik from Google mentioned that rewarding validation & accessibility of documents would be a 'slippery slope'.

Eric Ward

Not in my case, but other's have said yes.

Thomas Bindl

SEs have to be able to extract content, so a certain amount of valid code is important

Christine Churchill

Only becomes an issue when the error keeps the spider from indexing a page properly.

Michael Gray

validation is not a requirement to rank, but having massive amounts of errors can create problems.

Ben Pfeiffer

Doesn't influence ranking unless it greatly alters page structure.

Guillaume

I suppose it does, but we're not a good example and we can still achieve great SERPs.

Joost de Valk

I don't believe this affects the ranking, having little markup and lots of text-content does though.

Ani Kortikar

Google will always want good content, even if it is not in a properly validated document. Its good to have validation, but slight deviations are acceptable.

Caveman

From an SEO perspective, all but completely useless. By products of validation (ease of access, fast load times, browser compatibility, etc.) provide some value.

Todd Malicoat

Invalid code can be a stumbling block to proper indexing. Valid code is the only solution. I really doubt search engines spend the processing cycles to make sure your code is valid. Validating code does however: 1. increase the likelihood you'll be properly spidered. 2. Improve accessibility (and users on your site)

Roger Montti aka martinibuster

Bad HTML could possibly lead to a bad indexing. This is somewhat remote because Google's crawlers have become better at indexing the content. But why make it hard for the bot?

Site/Domain Attributes

The factors below contribute to Google's rankings based on the site/domain on which a page resides.

Barry Welford

Individual web page assessment is the most important. The PageRank mechanism will arrange that global link popularity will be automatically distributed among web pages on the website.

Neil Patel

I am a strong believer that a sites overall link popularity drastically effect rankings.

Lucas Ng (aka shor)

Think of a web page as a town. If a city has freeways, airports, train stations, bus shelters and a port, that's a good indicator that it is an important hub. That orphaned web page with no links pointing to it? It may as well be a hidden tribe of Amazons that no one has discovered.

Eric Ward

But not for all subjects. Some subjects should show a wide IBL profile, like global warming, but what about a site devoted to ice fishing on lake superior? Nope.

Danny Sullivan

I'd prefer if you called this link authority of site rather than link popularity.

Aaron Wall

You can publish low quality documents on well linked sites and they will rank based largely on the domain's link authority.

Ben Pfeiffer

The talk of the town. These days its more about quality than quantity.

Debra Mastaler

Is this 'global' as in geographic or as in overall?

Guillaume

Technorati skyscrapping feeds is a great example!

Marcus Tandler

even better, if most of the links are of great quality!

Caveman

Links matter greatly, but massive linking may be over-rated by SEO's. We have sites with a fraction of the links that competitors boast, and still win in the SERP's. The quality of linking sites, the proximity to important "seed sites", the number of thematically related links from other relevant sites, and ratios of one-way inbound links to other kinds of links are all important, and together can trump pages that are far more heavily linked.

Todd Malicoat

The trends are moving away from link popularity as the biggest factor in information retrieval - though new solutions won't be extremely effective anytime soon. Until then, we'll all be worried about getting mo' betta links.

Rae Hoffman

Look at about.com and then do backlink checks on some of their smaller sections that are ranking for medium competition keywords. A lot of times you'll see nothing but scrapers and some links from the about.com network... they're able to rank on domain authority.

Roger Montti aka martinibuster

This speaks more to statistical probability. Deep links are nice.

Scottie Claiborne

I believe it's always had some importance and within the past two years, aging has taken on more signifigance in the ranking factors.

Barry Welford

Very new may slow down true ranking evaluation in competitive fields.

Jill Whalen

Big factor, especially for sites less than 1 year old.

Chris Boggs

We have seen new sites flourish as long as they have a clear connection to the "parent" site that has already gained trust.

Barry Schwartz

with diminishing returns... the importance depends on the age... so hard to judge with this one. a new site, this is very important and old site, this is not so important.

Eric Ward

Link Moses has the proof...

Neil Patel

Older sites seem to be grandfathered in.

Mike McDonald

Certainly taken into account by some search engines.

Michael Gray

it's not really the age of the site that's important it's the age of the links to the site that are.

Ben Pfeiffer

Can't be faked. Links assist in this determination of age and has some impact on ranking.

Guillaume

Buying a new domain now is just a nightmare.

Lucas Ng (aka shor)

Old sites with ye olde registrar are tremendously respected by Google.

Marcus Tandler

see "Age of Document" - a little de-valued, but still a very important factor!

Caveman

Young sites must prove themselves before they can start ranking for much of anything important; middle-aged sites are left to fight it out on their own; and well aged sites enjoy a halo I wish I experienced in my personal life. :P

Todd Malicoat

The older the berry the sweeter the link juice.

Roger Montti aka martinibuster

Can get away with a little more to a certain extent.

Scottie Claiborne

I think, in a perfect algorythm, relevance matters. Whether Google has figured out how to pull it off yet or not, I don't know but I do believe that is the ultimate goal. Whether they get more "weight" or not, relevant links are good business and help with rankings as well.

Eric Ward

If it doesn't I've wasted 14 years of my life.

Russ Jones

Does it include the keyword? Again, I still think themes are bunk.

Lucas Ng (aka shor)

All of your neighbours have a wide variety of thematic inbound link text from a wide variety of topical sites. You have the same anchor text from your unrelated porn/pills/casino link farm. Chances are a search engine can instantly spot you as a 'deviant' from the norm and flag you as having an unnatural inbound linking pattern.

Neil Patel

Getting highly relevant links carry more weight. Hosting companies are notoriously known for buying links from everyone who ranks in the top 100 for "web hosting".

Mike McDonald

This is one of the most important things about 'good' inbound links.

Michael Gray

Links from sites about a specific topic play a role in determining topical relevancy.

Guillaume

I don't think it needs to be 100% topic, I think a good part should though.

Marcus Tandler

Is important, and will probably get even more important in the future

Chris Boggs

Difficult to pinpoint what you mean here, but if the link comes from a topical page, it seems to help more. This is with the exception of news, informational or media sites which by nature have a variety of subjects.

Caveman

We seem to have moved from analysis of simply anchor text, to including surrounding text and probably even page theme.

Todd Malicoat

Very important factor. Relevant, targeted links from relevant citations.

Rae Hoffman

Again, traffic = footprints of good and valid marketing/attention.

Roger Montti aka martinibuster

This has been going on for a long time. I believe there are enhancements to weed out non-organic links, though.

Scottie Claiborne

Google's never been as community/relevance-focused as say, Teoma, but I do think they are working on relevance issues do help return more focused results.

Guillaume

I've seen one of my sites goes from #39 to #1 right after I got 1 link... from the #1 spot on the keyword I was trying to get... So I'll let you guess what my answer is.

Lucas Ng (aka shor)

A niche site may not have a high quantity of links but a few links from the 'authorities' in the neighbourhood is often enough to rank the site above the authorities for niche-related keywords. The authoritative sites are telling the search engines "Hey, we're voting for this site for these niche (anchor text) keywords".

Eric Ward

Bingo. Especially if that topical community contains many other signals of trust.

Michael Gray

You need to have some links from within your topical community to rank.

Marcus Tandler

I think this will become even more important in the future. ASK is doing it quit nicely at the moment. And for now - it always help getting your link up on a topical authority and the hub(s) in your topical community

Jill Whalen

Link popularity in general is important. I'm not sure if it actually matters whether it is in a topical community or not.

Chris Boggs

Look at the top SEM forums and blogs for proof.

Caveman

One of the most important aspects of external linking. I'll take two high quality links from thematically connected sites in the same community, over four links from sites of equal stature in unrelated communities. The papers on TrustRank and seed sites are helpful.

Todd Malicoat

You gotta have link love from all the popular kids in your niche. Play nice.

Rae Hoffman

I do believe there is something to be said for themed links - if for no other reason than that they will actually bring traffic. What I'm implying with that statement is up to you to decide. ;-)

Roger Montti aka martinibuster

Good sites cluster, as do bad sites?

Neil Patel

If you keep on getting thousands of natural links your rankings will start going up. I have seen this quite a bit due to Digg.

Ben Pfeiffer

Can have dramatic effects for new sites.

Debra Mastaler

I've seen sites go up in rank with a large # of new inbounds when there's also an increase in content/traffic/publicity/links. There can be a delay in seeing upward rank if themajority of links accured come from crap sites. I have never seen a site take a hit when a large # of links are added.

Barry Schwartz

totally depends on other things...

Scottie Claiborne

I believe this can impact new/untrusted sites. I think the more "trustworthy" your site is (age, links, etc) the less impact you will see.

Eric Ward

There are many legit reasons why a site might inspire a bunch of links quickly, as well as reasons why it shouldn't.

Barry Welford

A large apparently automatic addition of large numbers of inlinks would trigger some reaction.

Aaron Wall

See Rand's post here http://www.seomoz.org/blog/two-clarifications-on-how-search-engines-interpret-links

Mike McDonald

Could be a sign of link gaming/spamming.

Michael Gray

Bursty link growth assed as both a signal of quality or spam depending on the occurance of other factors. An increase in links and an increase in search volume, and SERP click throughs, or toolbar traffic is good. Link growth without any secondary corroborating data is bad.

Guillaume

I think it kinda proves the long term credibility of a site so I'd have to agree

Lucas Ng (aka shor)

I don't believe it has much importance for ranking, but combined with other filters, will give Google an indication whether a 'google-bomb' went off.

Marcus Tandler

New links are always good, and tell google that your content is still worthwile

Jill Whalen

I don't really know enough about this one from any person experience, but of course anything that would create a red flag, could cause further scrutiny to a site.

Natasha Robinson

I think this plays a bigger role in Google's News Algo

Chris Boggs

We have not been able to trigger any seeming penalities for this, but when a site starts out with a gazillion links to it...

Caveman

Hugely important. It was probably a critical tool in the fight against blog spam, for example. A site right out of the gate gets 2,000 links in weeks: It's either a really hot new site, or it's spam. Spikes in link appearance can indicate spam, bought links, or a legitimate news event. Either way, those links are a strong indicator of something worth knowing. Prediction: G is working right now on a way to better evaluate (and IMO dampen) the effects of link baiting within the blog and 2.0 community.

Todd Malicoat

Likely just a threshhold variable. If you're gettin 1,000 links a week and have no real user traffic - you'll likely have a problem. Links ALONE don't cut it anymore.

Rae Hoffman

I don't think getting fifty links overnight will kill you. Especially if those links are bringing traffic and from quality sites. Getting 100K links overnight and having no visitors or search queries as a result smells abit fishy no matter how you look at it. I had a site launch recently that got 300-500 links virtually overnight, but they were from trusted and authoritative sites, we had an alexa rank to match it and search queries being done in the engines about the site - all things pointed to us deserving and obtaining those links legitimately. And we broke the "sandbox", "trustbox", whatever the term of choice is lately in less than a week.

Roger Montti aka martinibuster

Should show that a site is important. Weight links for temporary topicality (newsworty) then drop it and allow cumulative effect to impact in time with steady growth.

EGOL

As long as you have some anchor text with the query words from sites that are about the query topic.

Ben Pfeiffer

I'd say we wouldn't have very good search results if this didn't matter. Important more so now that Google has attacked the reasons for google bombs in order so that this is more in line.

Will Critchlow

Counter examples include wide-reaching sites such as wikipedia.

Eric Ward

More for Web search than news search, but sometimes I see results that make no sense at all.

Barry Welford

Particularly given the other listings that Google offers, e.g. in Google Blogsearch

Russ Jones

Does it include the keyword? Aside from that, I still think themes are bunk.

Michael Gray

Subject matter does help but it plays an inferior role to domain trust and authority.

Guillaume

We have seen examples of both sides happening (Technorati, YouTube vs Zillow)

Marcus Tandler

old and trusted sites can still rank for anything!

Chris Boggs

This is especially true now that "Google bombing" has been addressed.

Caveman

I'm a big believer in the importance of site-wide factors, and IMO they include site theme defined by keyword analysis. It's not hard to see that with Google, the more important a keyword phrase is to a site, the harder it is for the site to rank for that keyword. That's especially true for newer sites, which often in the beginning can rank only for more obscure, long-tail terms. Semantic analysis can easily identify a phrase that is used in all documents of a Web site, giving Google the option of not ranking the site for that term (at least initially), or elevating the site's standing for searches related to that term.

Todd Malicoat

Relevance is the top goal of any search engine (unless perhaps they are trying to inflate the volume of ad clicks). The best long term strategy for any SEO is to be the most relevant site for a given term (seems kinda like a no-brainer, huh?)

Rae Hoffman

I think the base "topic" of your domain matters. I think that a site that is historically been successful in ranking for terms like "long distance", "toll free services" and "local phone service" may see some issues when trying to break into the serps for newer sections of their site like VoIP without additional marketing efforts aimed at that specific topic.

Roger Montti aka martinibuster

Wikipedia?

EGOL

They need their heads examined if they are not looking at this!

Andy Hagans

This is future looking--will matter more in '08 than it does in '07.

Lucas Ng (aka shor)

Increasingly more important. There's little doubt that the search engines can 'see' what users are doing, especially users that have opted-in to certain search engine products. Once you have a critical mass of users, why wouldn't you use that data? If I knew that the no.2 result has 5x the click-through rate of no.1, I'd be moving no.2 to no.1 ASAP! It's obviously more relevant to the engine's users...

Ruud Hein

I believe Google is still at the learning stage here: gather data and try to understand it, try to map it to actual user behavior. Which patterns map to which type of searches and sites?

Eric Ward

Will matter more as personalized search improves.

Eric Enge

This one will become a HUGE factor over time.

Barry Welford

This is valuable data and must be included, given that Google has so much of this data.

Aaron Wall

If many people search for a specific brand that is a strong sign of trust, quality, and demand from users.

Wil Reynolds

May become more important over time

Michael Gray

Data gathered from toolbar, bookmarks and other google elements are definitely starting to play a more important role. I expect to see personalized search getting more and more attention.

Ben Pfeiffer

This question needs more clarification.

Debra Mastaler

Probably more than we know.

Guillaume

More and more important nowadays with all those informations available through netvibes, technorati's, feedburner, etc.

Will Critchlow

I have not done enough testing to be sure. I feel this isn't happening much if at all yet (at least in the UK) but think it has to be on the horizon as a serious factor.

Marcus Tandler

very dangerous to let that become too influential, cause it´s to easy to fake. But the CTR in the SERPS is definetly a factor!

Jill Whalen

This one is difficult to determine, but it wouldn't surprise me if some of this stuff was used in weighting factors.

Ani Kortikar

This is likely to become very important as google gets a much larger set of data from analytics, toolbar and personalization.

Chris Boggs

Time spent on page may be a factor if person visited from a SERP and "back-clicked," but we do not have enough data to support this theory.

Caveman

Historical Performance of Site as Measured by Time Spent on Page, Click-through's from SERP's, Direct Visits, Bookmarks, etc. (comments)
The only reason I gave this a "2" instead of a "1" is the "bookmarks" thing...and maybe time spent on site. Time spent on site makes a certain amount of sense if searchers repeatedly spend only a few moments on a site and return to Google to click elsewhere. But trying to infer "quality" of a site from click patterns is insanely difficult given the infinite differences in site type, site objectives, user mindsets, etc.

Todd Malicoat

More important by the day. As they become better benchmarks, and their is more archived information, these are the related factors that make link popularity less important. They CAN be more accurate for predicting relevance than citation based algorithms, so they will continue to grow in importance.

Rae Hoffman

I get flack on this, but I do believe good marketing brings traffic and noticeable "footprints" that don't exist with manufactured marketing efforts. I think those footprints matter, especially with a large influx of links coming in.

Roger Montti aka martinibuster

This relates to user experience.

Danny Sullivan

Just speculating here, Rand? And why not a manual authority for Yahoo, which we actually know does indeed give sites a human authority checkoff because they've explicitly said this.

Rand Fishkin

I don't personally believe that Google manually assigns weight to domains.

Debra Mastaler

It's the only way DMOZ survives.

Will Critchlow

If it ever happens - I think this is rare, but if it did happen, it would be potentially a strong weight.

Chris Boggs

Wikipedia for example?

Barry Schwartz

manual?

EGOL

lol.... probably not important most of the time. But if this ever is important - and I am not saying that it is - then you are one lucky dog!

Jonah Stein

If you can get a handjob, your SEO project will have a happy ending, HOWEVER, google denies every rumor about anyone who claims a competitor got one. More importantly, it can't be considered an SEO factor unless you can explain to other people how to get one. On the other hand, Manual PENALTIES definitely exist.

Scottie Claiborne

If the site has been reviewed by Google (and most haven't) I would assume that their manually adjusted changes would have a great affect on the placement of the site.

Eric Ward

It would be naive to assume Google does not have some method to single out a site one way or the other...Explain wikipedia's rankings...

Barry Welford

Not a factor in general. However I'm sure that for 'famous' websites, if they don't rate well, then some manual adjustment is possible.

Aaron Wall

I do not think the authority is manually given, I believe it is more an issue of it earning trust through aging and/or gaining authoritative links.

Michael Gray

Domain trust and authority is probably the single largest factor in any websites ability to rank.

Guillaume

Heh, if they can do that, it's sad... I wonder how much it costs to do that :)

Joost de Valk

I DO NOT believe in hand jobs except for some very, very, very rare occasions

Marcus Tandler

if something like this i happening, it probably helps a lot. But how can you determine it? I would only guess something like sitelinks.

Jill Whalen

I don't know if they manually boost rankings and would like to think that they don't.

Caveman

There are multiple issues. We know some sites are given a pass. And some sites that behave badly and get penalized as a result are too often quickly let back into the SERP's. More important is the profound effect to be seen when G enters a category to "clean it up". When a category undergoes a major shake up in the SERP's like that, and the rest of the Web's SERP's don't budge, it's easy enough to tell that something category specific just happened.

Todd Malicoat

It's important - though I don't think it happens incredibly often since Google wants to maintain that the algorithm is completely non-biased and run by silicon based intelligence. Wait a second - I though it was "search engine ranking factors" and only IMPLIED we were talking about Google (since they're the only ones sending enough traffic to matter)

Rae Hoffman

If you believe Google has a whitelist, I'd have to imagine being on it is like taking steroids and playing sports. It doesn't guarantee you a win, but it does mean you don't have to work as hard to do it.

Roger Montti aka martinibuster

I'm fairly certain there are quality checkers, but I think their input feeds into a scalable solution.

Jonah Stein

Their is at best a small difference within the TLDs for .com, .edu, .gov, .org and .mil. The common belief that the TLD matters is actually an artifact of the linking profile common for a .edu, .org or .mil site that is different than a commercial site. Other TLDs like .tv and .go are much less desirable.

Danny Sullivan

And much more if we're talking country specific sites.

Lucas Ng (aka shor)

Would you like a crappy college student's .edu page or a topical link from an authority? It's not so much the TLD that matters but the fact that gov/edu sites are usually very authoritative sites, due to the number of IBL they receive.

Ruud Hein

Newer TLD's can only apply to new sites/domains. So they have the young site drawback. The drawback is age of the domain, not the TLD itself.

Barry Schwartz

depends on the tld

Scottie Claiborne

I don't believe the extension itself makes a difference- however I do believe that the more restricted tld's like edu and gov tend to generally be higher quality/well trusted sites.

Eric Ward

Taken alone, meaningless, but as part of the larger whole, very important.

Barry Welford

It seems logical that this would have an effect. It certainly does to the human searcher.

Aaron Wall

Strongly weighted for local results. Typically non commercial trusted domains (like .gov and .edu) likely also get a boost.

Russ Jones

the easier to get, the worse they are (avoid .infos like the plague, but you are never going to get a .edu)

Thomas Bindl

only helpful for getting links

Michael Gray

.edu and .gov TLD's are definitely givien more weight.

Ben Pfeiffer

I don't believe .org's are any better than .com's or .net's. When did that theory become fact? Other extensions .edu and .gov can carry additional weight, especially in other engines. However .com should have no problem outranking .edu's with the right links.

Guillaume

10 for 1 for those rare links! I pay in bulk!

Jill Whalen

No effect, big SEO myth.

Chris Boggs

We have not tested this extensively.

Caveman

Granted, inbound link profiles at .edu or .gov give those sites high quality and authority scores. But not so high as to have the powerful effect on rankings that their outbound links seem to have. Google is on a quest to sort the world's information. If you were Google, wouldn't you inherently trust information from .edu's and .gov's over most commercial sites?

Todd Malicoat

Try finding a .jobs that ranks well. I dare you. Gov's and edu's are trusted more to an extent - though there are certainly filters to balance the added trust. Stay away from .biz, info, etc. if at all possible.

Roger Montti aka martinibuster

Some extensions are statistically more likely to be spammy. Why not?

Scottie Claiborne

I don't believe the rate of adding pages has anything to do with ranking, but I do believe the more good pages of content you have, the better.

Barry Welford

A large apparently automatic addition of large numbers of web pages might trigger some reaction.

Ben Pfeiffer

I think you are fine here. In my experience I have never seen a negative from too many pages. I think its been said that anything over 500,000 pages is flagged for a review. Just don't be stupid.

Laura Lippay

Also taken in context - a News site can have 1,000 new pages a day, where a Pets site might have 1 a week, but that is the norm for that site. Deviation from the norm might be the item of importance here.

Barry Schwartz

totally depends on other things...

Eric Ward

Depends on the subject matter.

Debra Mastaler

Point a couple of links at them from established sites and bingo! They pop up pretty quick.

Guillaume

Top sites are generating content non-stop unless in a very specific niche!

Lucas Ng (aka shor)

Similar to the rate of inbound links, search engines can use this signal as a flag.

Jill Whalen

I can't imagine this could be a problem, but it's not one I've tested.

Natasha Robinson

I think that this only plays a role in sites that have authority in Google, such as well regarded news sites and Wikipedia

Chris Boggs

Again based on the niche

Caveman

I believe that adding too many pages too fast to a site -- as a percentage of total pages on that site -- puts the site at risk. It doesn't always sink the site, but it ca. We've seen and also experienced it too many times to be coincidence. There can be all sorts of reasons why a small site might all the sudden increase tenfold in size, and G knows that not all of those reasons are acceptable from their POV. Think e-commerce feeds, auto-gen pages, etc.

Todd Malicoat

Another threshhold variable to prevent aggregious spamming on old sites. If you're site is 100 pages - and suddenly turns into a 10,000 page site overnight you may have a problem, and reduce your trustscore.

Rae Hoffman

Again, this falls onto extremes vs. normal additions. I think a good site with a lot of traffic can get away with adding thousands of pages with no issues. If a site on doilies suddenly adds ten thousand pages overnight, and that is unusual for the site's original size, traffic and industry, you may see some issues. I think a lot of it boils down to the quality of the content on the pages.

Roger Montti aka martinibuster

This relates to statistical models for the industry as a whole with seeds determining a baseline.

EGOL

If the crowds are clammoring for you they need to listen.

Wil Reynolds

This would be neat now, but could be too easily manipulated for bad over time.

Ben Pfeiffer

Could potentially impact rankings. Google looks at this data of course but its hard to say whether its a current part of the algorithm.

Elisabeth Osmeloski

I don't know of any evidence to really support this, but I would (gut reaction) suspect that frequent searches for the same site over time may impact a SERP.

Eric Ward

Not sure about this question

Eric Enge

May become a small factor over time.

Michael Gray

queries for a specific domain can help google understand it's a term and not a misspelling (ie did you mean flickr.com)

Guillaume

Means the brand is strong, so Google can give its manual boost!

Will Critchlow

I don't have any sensible way of testing this and stripping out other effects. I would imagine it could easily have an effect, but to be honest, I have no idea.

Marcus Tandler

Is helping especially if you want to get a new site ranked quickly (instead of going to the sand- / trustbox)

Jill Whalen

Don't really know.

Chris Boggs

No research done on this.

Caveman

I've seen no evidence of this yet, though I believing it makes sense as a basic low-level measure of overall site credibility.

Todd Malicoat

Sounds like a good logical one. "Search Engine Father in-Law Syndrome" would be a good factor to measure (how many people type in www.yourdomain.com into a search box because they don't understand what an address bar is) - sounds like it could be used logicaly and usefully somewhere in the algorithm

Rae Hoffman

Again, this falls into what I've said above.

Roger Montti aka martinibuster

This relates to user experience.

Neil Patel

I have been using Google Webmaster Central for a good amount of sites, and for most it really has not helped.

Aaron Wall

Most quality sites will not be verified for some time to come.

Michael Gray

Does not help with ranking, however can increase crawling rate and re-inclusion requests from webmaster central are given more attention.

Chris Boggs

This IMO would only produce an effect if Webmaster Central's recommendations are implemented, and these effects would fall under other factors.

Barry Schwartz

but does it? :)

Eric Ward

Not yet for my three sites anyway...Might matter more someday.

Ben Pfeiffer

Not yet. ;-)

Guillaume

It's the same thing as Yahoo's 299$ directory listing; why don't you use the creator tools or paid service to get a little boost?

Marcus Tandler

could become a little factor in the future, but making this to influencial could be a bad mistake, since probably over 80% of GWC users are SEOs...

Jill Whalen

I have no experience with this to be able to answer it with any degree of certainty.

Caveman

Verification of Site with Google Webmaster Central (comments)
Part of their plot to identify every Webmaster in the world and associate every Web site with one of those Webmasters. I want no part of it. And I see very little if any evidence that it matters. Though I confess to worrying that it might, some day.

Todd Malicoat

Likely some importance towards trust. Assimilate to the borg or be annihilated.

Rae Hoffman

I've never verified a site with GWC that wasn't done for testing reasons and have never had an issue in ranking those sites.

Roger Montti aka martinibuster

This probably has more to do with discovery than ranking.

Inbound Link Attribute

These pieces affect Google's weighting of links from external websites pointing to a page.

Aaron Wall

Over the past year or two Google moved away from anchor text and more toward domain authority and number of quality citations.

Mike McDonald

Anchor text of the inbound link is one of the most concise assessments another person can make about what your site/page is 'about'.

Michael Gray

Anchor text plays a role as does the text adjacent to the link.

Marcus Tandler

Anchor Text is still the single most important factor

Eric Ward

ike all things, yes and no. Depends on the site giving and the site getting.

Russ Jones

Why do you think Syndk8.net ranks #4 for white hat seo in google? http://www.google.com/search?q=white+hat+seo&btnG=Search

Debra Mastaler

maybe less so now that gbombing is supposedly going out of style

Guillaume

One of the most important factor.

Lucas Ng (aka shor)

RIP "miserable failure", "exit" and "liar".

Jill Whalen

Another biggie.

Caveman

Anchor Text of Inbound Links (comments)
Hugely important still, and can do nearly as much harm as good, if all inbound links are close to identical. It's hard to beat a wide array of naturally occurring inbound anchor text from quality, related sites.

Todd Malicoat

Unless you want to rank for "click here", you had better start using targeted anchor text wherever and whenever possible.

Rae Hoffman

I think it matters, for sure. But, I think you need additional items besides just anchor text... and with Google especially making efforts to counteract things like Googlebombing, the additional attributes are needed for anchors to have full effect. But, that's Google. Yahoo and MSN are much more likely to listen to anchor text, and with Yahoo, aged anchor text can have even more of a benefit.

Roger Montti aka martinibuster

Very important but it's probably a good idea to mix things up.

Marcus Tandler

the better the linking site, the better the link

Chris Boggs

The link populairty of the linking page and site is probably the most important factor when deciding on a link.

Debra Mastaler

see previous global question

Caveman

To the extent that global link pop effects a sites overall quality score, it makes sense that that halo is felt by linked-to sites. Taking TBPR as a proxy for a page's general level of unweighted link juice, would you rather have a link from a PR2 CNN page, or a PR2 page from an unknown site? Given a choice, I'll take the CNN link on the basis that the *site's* popularity matters more when the relative PR of each page is the same.

Todd Malicoat

This is why people bought PageRank 7 site links for lots more than PageRank 6 links. The links were very valuable, and the information on how strong they were was very valuable (this is why it's also very hard to GET an accurate read on anymore without an SEO shaman)

Roger Montti aka martinibuster

This is an important metric that isn't reflected in the toolbar. I like links that are linked to by many sites. I think there's a big difference between a PR 6 site with 20,000 links and a PR 6 with 500 inbounds.

Mike McDonald

Topical relationship is not necessarily indicative of authority.

Guillaume

Very important.

Chris Boggs

Aagain, some sites/pages typically have a variety of subject matter.

Russ Jones

Keyword tunneling, as described above.

Marcus Tandler

Helps a lot

Caveman

Definitely matters; who knows precisely how much. Evidence of page contents from a linking page affecting rankings of the linked page has been out there for a while now.

Todd Malicoat

All links help - on topic helps a lot more overall.

Rae Hoffman

Depends on the engine. Some may find it surprising to hear me say this, but topic of the linking page usually has the most effect if it matches in MSN. I do think it matters in Google though as well.

Roger Montti aka martinibuster

This has been going on for a while now.

Scottie Claiborne

I don't think Google is "there" yet in terms of relevance, but I believe they are working towards that.

Michael Gray

if you don't have any links within your community it's going to be much more difficult to rank.

Marcus Tandler

especially true with hubs within a topical community

Russ Jones

Once again, anchor text tunneling.

Natasha Robinson

As a bad speller, I'm not one to talk... but I actually like the term "Link Poopularity" for sites that haven't any link popularity ;)

Chris Boggs

Link poop-ularity? :p

Caveman

I'll take this measure as the closest thing in the survey to topical/category authority. The more authority a site has, the more important its links can be to related sites.

Todd Malicoat

I'll take 1 authority link over 100 crappy links any day of the week (and twice on Sundays).

Rae Hoffman

If a site is being linked to by most other sites in their industry, especially if they are considered trusted, there is probably a valid reason.

Roger Montti aka martinibuster

I don't think this is as important. I think it's page specific.

Neil Patel

This makes it difficult to take out old sites that rank well.

Russ Jones

Links aging, I believe, is a fundamental factor in the latest search algorithms.

Chris Boggs

We have tested and it seems that 3-4 months is a minimum target for Google, and the longer after that the better.

Eric Ward

In my case yes, for some others, no.

Eric Enge

hard call, this one.

Michael Gray

new links take time to mature before they start passing any value.

Ben Pfeiffer

It does influence the trust assigned to the document based on the past linkage.

Debra Mastaler

age of page trumps

Guillaume

Will they ever remove the initial penalty? NO!!!

Marcus Tandler

Like all "age"-stuff: Age rocks! The longer a link exists, the better it gets. It´s just like a good wine...

Caveman

There has been debate on "age of link" versus "age of site." I see evidence that both are in effect, but I don't know. Imagine: You have a site with 100 inbound links of varying quality, all three or more years old. You lose 50 overnight. Three months later, the 50 come back from those same sites, but not with the same exact placement or text. We believe the effect of that would be negative. ;-)

Todd Malicoat

There is certainly an "amortization period" for links to garner their full value. I wouldn't venture a guess as to how long, but I would guess there is a certain curve to this with most links taking several months to see 80% or so of their total value - then they may increase marginally after that point. As with the rest of the babble of mine that you've read if you got this far - this is sheer speculation on my part.

Rae Hoffman

I think the age of a link matters quite a bit, in all engines, with MSN being the least likely to withold any siginficant amount of weight based on the link age. Yahoo seems to have a threshold for when a link will have full value based on age. Google seems to treat links like wines... considering them better with each passing block of time.

Roger Montti aka martinibuster

Trust.

Guillaume

Very important.

Marcus Tandler

It´s enough, if it´s a trusted domain, and the page your link is on is relevant ... but it sure helps if the whole site is topically relevant to your site

Russ Jones

Even more watered down keyword tunneling.

Caveman

I'm tempted to say that the linking page matters more, but as a believer that many site-wide factors affect page rankings, it's possible that site theme is now taken into account. Getting links from relevant authority sites is very helpful. How much of that is *relevance* versus *authority* I don't know, since getting links from very high authority sites - even if their theme is not very related to your site - can be very valuable.

Todd Malicoat

Topical relevance can definitely be stretched, and just about any site can cover many topics. There is something to be said, however, for getting highly topical links from sites in your same niche.

Rae Hoffman

Same as above.

Roger Montti aka martinibuster

More page related, imo.

Neil Patel

I launched a site called Fruit Cast a year or so ago and it ranked for podcast advertising right away because of the text surrounding the links. It still ranks today and I have nothing on that site.

Michael Gray

given more weight when the anchor text is non keyword focused such as "click here"

Marcus Tandler

will probably get more important in the future. link clusters in the footer f.e. are a clear sign for google, that the links are not that valuable

Chris Boggs

Based on recent studies, this is becoming more and more important. Looking at Google Image results testing showed us that they wheigh the image's content based on surrounding text as much as any image feature.

Russ Jones

Not affecting contextually or relevantly, just that the link looks more natural.

Ben Pfeiffer

Can have some impact.

Caveman

As noted above, we seem to have moved from analysis of simply anchor text, to including surrounding text and probably even page theme.

Todd Malicoat

This falls into the topic of page I think

Rae Hoffman

Again, engine based. Most likely to help in MSN or Google.

Roger Montti aka martinibuster

What would you think about a link to a mortgage site in close proximity to text surrounding a hoodia link?

Eric Ward

I've seen instances where one link from one internal page from one site resulted in page one rankings for the site being linked to.

Michael Gray

properly focused internal anchor text is very helpful once domain trust has been established.

Chris Boggs

This can backfire if gamed too ehavily and if the site has too few IBLs from other domains.

Debra Mastaler

not really sure what the question is here.

Caveman

Relevance and other quality measures being equal across two pages within a site, I would opt for a link from a more well-linked page than the less well-linked page. However, relevance and link authority of a page are now so closely tied together it can be hard to separate the two.

Todd Malicoat

A link from a site's strongest subpage is much more beneficial than a link from an orphaned page on a site.

Roger Montti aka martinibuster

Sorry, don't understand this question.

Ben Pfeiffer

Yes this is impactful based on when the link was created and how long it has been around. A lot going on here.

Chris Boggs

same as age of link

Debra Mastaler

sounds like the twilight zone.

Caveman

IMO, age of links matters. It is part of why well-established sites tend to thrive.

Todd Malicoat

If lots of your links get pulled it can't be a good thing. Perhaps "google popping" is the new "google bowling" (putting up links for a competitor and pulling them down shortly after to negatively effect temporal link attributes).

Roger Montti aka martinibuster

Some links indicate a newsworthiness. Couple with continued inbound links, that could indicate relevance to the topic overall. Uncoupled, it means it was temporarily relevant.

EGOL

In theory "no"... but most know that .edu and .gov links are valuable because they often have a ton of trusted and powerful links hitting them from great websites.

Michael Gray

.gov and .edu sites are more important

Marcus Tandler

People tend to overrate .edu links. A link from an .edu site has no bonus, it´s just that university tend to have more trust then other sites by their charastics - being old & crusty and having tons of inbound links.

Eric Ward

Taken alone, meaningless, but as part of the larger whole, very important.

Russ Jones

Very difficult, however, to determine if this is a factor of the extension or the authority.

Ben Pfeiffer

If I had my choice I would take a .edu any day. I think links from any other extension can be just as useful if the factors are right.

Debra Mastaler

it's more about the juice behind the page, not the TLD

Ruud Hein

The power of a .edu link (for example) does *not* come from the .edu TLD...

Chris Boggs

Very strongly weighted, but as long as the page itslef is also strong. Seems as if student page links are not working as much...based on personal testing not AA|RF because we would never reach out to students for links.

Caveman

If as I believe .edu's and .gov's are trusted in some above-average way, it stands to reason the site they link to benefit in some above average way.

Todd Malicoat

Edu's count higher because they are generally more trusted (for a variety of inherent reasons aside from JUST being an edu domain) - this is only ONE factor, however, and taking ANY one factor away from the algo by itself is essentially worthless. All else being equal their trust value is probably not all that much higher than a regular dot com. .edus and .govs are generally older more well linked sites is why their trustscore is so much higher.

Figuring out how the factors and filters work together is the important concept of this document, and of creating websites that rank effectively.

Rae Hoffman

I think that .gov and .edu historically are harder to get links from and harder to manufacture links from. I am speaking solely of base levels of these types of sites though. Pages owned by students, etc seem to have less linking out power, though their ability to rank on their own seems to have some "help" from the .edu url and possibly from the weight of the root domain as a whole.

Roger Montti aka martinibuster

I think there are stronger and more important factors involved. The extension might be a fractional part of the equation, something to raise one eyebrow or suggest that something is sketchy but not actually define it as sketchy itself, not without corroborating evidence.

EGOL

Lots of people will say "no" but it is still a good measure of connectivity and says something about the site.

Aaron Wall

The toolbar is perpetually outdated, but Google uses PageRank values to help set crawling priorities and to determine if a document should go in the regular or supplmental index.

Mike McDonald

Good as a general barometer. Don't get too wound up over it though.

Ben Pfeiffer

I think we have said all we need to say on PageRank. Its not much a factor anymore and data presented in a toolbar is months old. Webmaster have become to reliant on this indicator to make their decisions.

Scottie Claiborne

The PR of the page definitely matters (as it is part of the formula) but the Toolbar PR is seldom correct these days and gives only a rough estimate of the value.

Eric Ward

My feelings about Pagerank are well known. Ignore it.

Barry Welford

PageRank is a show-biz concept but nevertheless it is correlated with the number of inlinks and these links and the anchor text will have a major influence on ranking.

Russ Jones

Still a decent measure

Michael Gray

page rank published in the google toolbar is for entertainment purposes only, and is not the real pagerank.

Debra Mastaler

toolbar being the optimum word here.

Will Critchlow

Doesn't directly influence ranking, though may well be correlated with it.

Lucas Ng (aka shor)

The importance of PageRank is inversely proportional to the SEO knowledge pf the user.

Marcus Tandler

Topical Relevance and trust are way more important

Chris Boggs

Good for a guideline, but far less important than other attributes of the linking page. Generally, it seems that the pages with the best attributes also have at least decent PR, though.

Caveman

As a general measure of a page's link popularity, TBPR still holds some interest. But we stopped looking at it years ago when it became clear that themed links matter, neighborhoods and communities matter, proximity to important Web sites matters, and low PR pages can often beat higher PR pages in the SERP's.

Todd Malicoat

Pagerank is very useful for explaining the CONCEPT of link popularity to folks new to the idea. It is hugely important to explain the PARADOX of pagerank. It also helps to explain the dynamic between search engines and SEO's.

Rae Hoffman

God, please - can we leave the toolbar PR in 2002 where it belongs? TBPR is not true PR.

Roger Montti aka martinibuster

PageRank as measured by the toolbar is a red herring. There are too many variables that don't show up in the toolbar that make it incredibly flimsy as an SEO tool.

Negative Crawling/Ranking Attributes

These components may negatively affect a spider's ability to crawl a page or its rankings at Google.

EGOL

Why should they have links high in the SERPs that click through to air?

Aaron Wall

If they can't crawl your new content then others are at an advantage by being crawled first. Plus if a server is down often search engines may not want to send visitors to that site as much.

Ben Pfeiffer

If the site is not live for more than 48 hours it seems to drop pretty fast from the index.

Scottie Claiborne

Often being the key word- yes.

Lucas Ng (aka shor)

REALLY Limits the crawlerability of the site. :)

Chris Boggs

If repeated, this could be a problem, but again ahve not had much exprience with this.

Caveman

Same comments as above.

Todd Malicoat

Hosting is a commodity - if you can't get good hosting - you're site probably sucks. No soup rankings for you.

Roger Montti aka martinibuster

I saw this happen a few years ago where a host throttled Gbot with hair raising results ensuing.

Scottie Claiborne

Since the engines only need one copy of the exact same content, I do think they drop identical content. In a perfect world, there would be a lot less duplicates in the listings and I think that is where Google is headed. I don't think duplicate content draws a penalty- it just isn't needed in the index.

DazzlinDonna

If your content is filtered out as a duplicate, then that is strongly detrimental.

Laura Lippay

Can affect visibility and/or indirectly affect ranking by splitting inlink value, depending on the nature of the "duplicate".

Barry Schwartz

depends on number

EGOL

This could get your page filtered, but might not hurt rankings much if you escape the filter.

Eric Ward

Again, meaningless alone but as a potential signal/indicator of overall behavior, useful.

Eric Enge

Google wants to have one copy of the content in their index.

Aaron Wall

If pages on a site are too similar to one another then

Michael Gray

duplicate content can be huge problem. However the more trust/authority a domain has the less of a factor it becomes.

Ben Pfeiffer

We have seen this many times effect rankings of documents and sites. Duplicate content is at an all time reactive mode. Not all duplicate content is bad, some is necessary because there are not other alternatives.

Will Critchlow

Unless you are the canonical source with others copying in which case I think Google is generally smart enough to tell. As is the case with all the scrapers of seomoz for example.

Chris Boggs

Using syndicated travel content does not seem to have harmed some test pages.

Caveman

Huge issue still today. Google's zealousness in this regard has knocked countless little gems of sites out of the rankings, and too often left the SERP's as a mix of not-very-relevant pages from high authority sites, plus pages from aggressive link builders who know how to be the link analysis aspects of the algo's. Greatest issues include the effect of scraped content on legitimate pages, and sites that cut their information too finely across multiple pages, because they are not SE experts. Who said you should not build pages with the SE's in mind? These days it's almost essential, if for no other reason than to avoid unintentional consequences.

Todd Malicoat

Duplicate content is not relevant and thus will be eradicated. You can use it for users, but don't let the engines see it.

Rae Hoffman

I have a way I use to explain this: A couple has six children and you meet one of them and they are a total brat... but you wouldn't automatically assume the other five are. If you meet five of their children and they're brats, you will likely assume the sixth child is without meeting them. Same with dupe content - a little bit of it should have no effect on the domain as a whole. A lot of it, especially a high percentage of your pages, having duplicate content can cause issues for the entire root domain.

Roger Montti aka martinibuster

This is basic.

Russ Jones

Find a black hat SEO who didn't learn this lesson the hard way after ruining their 1 white hat venture by using it to index a spam site.

Lucas Ng (aka shor)

Linking out to a low quality neighbourhood flags you as a resident of the same neighbourhood.

Ani Kortikar

its the ratio of bad links/total links that is important.

Natasha Robinson

I still file this one under Google FUD.

Barry Schwartz

depends on number

Scottie Claiborne

Who you link TO matters. It always has. You control it, so you must recommend those links.

Eric Ward

By itself, meaningless, but as a potential signal/indicator of overall behavior, useful.

Aaron Wall

Every good site probably has at least a few bad outbound links, but a well upkept site is easier to trust and rank.

Michael Gray

some links to low quality sites are impossible to avoid, however as they start to make up a larger proportion of total outbound links it becomes problematic.

Ben Pfeiffer

There needs to be more definition on what low quality and spam means. A bad neighborhood is one thing as a low quality MFA site is another. Linking to a MFA site will not harm your ranking but linking to a bad/rough neighborhood definately could.

DazzlinDonna

This is usually an all or nothing situation. Either you get into trouble or you don't.

Debra Mastaler

If they're the ONLY links - not good.

Will Critchlow

Don't know from direct experience, but I believe it is (/ should be) detrimental.

Marcus Tandler

again - depends on the overall ratio

Chris Boggs

would not know. :)

Caveman

A very good way to get your site/pages in hot water.

Todd Malicoat

Don't link to skanky neighborhoods. Pick your partners wisely.

Rae Hoffman

Oh, I've seen examples of this occuring - sites where once the link farms from 2002 were cleaned up, they saw an immediate boost in rankings to top 30-50 and then saw a slow, but methodical boost each update to the rankings they desired.

Roger Montti aka martinibuster

This is pretty basic.

Aaron Wall

Duplicate content filters are getting tougher. If a site does not have much content and has excessive duplication it not only suppresses rankings, but it may also get many pages thrown in the supplemental results.

Ben Pfeiffer

I think this question is confusing and needs to be rephrased. Having the same titles and metas on the entire site is not going to inhibit rankings or crawling. The site just doesn't rank as well because its not optimized correctly. Google will try to extract as much information/relevance from the site and rank it according to that.

Lucas Ng (aka shor)

Having duplicate titles on many pages severely limits the ranking ability of your pages, especially those in the long tail that will not have many inbound links. Those pages compete on internal links and title tag relevance, so its important to have a unique title on each page.

Chris Boggs

Seems to be the number one way into supplementals, at least for now.

Scottie Claiborne

Duplicate titles and descriptions can discourage the spider from continuing through the site as all the pages at first glance "look" the same to it.

Eric Enge

Don't compete for the same kwds on many pages. The issue with the meta tags is more about treiggering duplicate content filters.

DazzlinDonna

From experience, I've seen this completely wipe out a site. Fixing the problem brings it right back. However, some sites do fine for a long time with this problem. So, it seems to be an "if it gets noticed" scenario.

Marcus Tandler

welcome to the supplemental index...

Caveman

One of the most common and basic mistakes I see, even at the big sites. Probably billions of dollars at stake here, if these problems were simply fixed all around the Web.

Todd Malicoat

Dupe content can damage a site's trustscore.

Rae Hoffman

Every page should always, always, always have a unique title tag.

Roger Montti aka martinibuster

This has been documented.

Scottie Claiborne

I think this has to be pretty extreme, but yes, I believe stuffed sites can be impacted with lower rankings.

Guillaume

Way less important in foreign languages

Lucas Ng (aka shor)

Whatever method the SEs user to target stuffing, once a certain threshold is breached, the page in question gets flagged and some bad things could happen to your SE presence.

Natasha Robinson

Again... those viagra and real estate splogs still seem to do alright.

Russ Jones

Mostly just ignored these days. More so than penalized.

Caveman

Another easy way to depress a site's rankings, but it depends greatly on where and how the words are overused, and what other related words are present in key areas of the site and pages (title, META, H1, high level text and links can all play a role). Sometimes called the Over Optimization Penalty, it's not a penalty. It relates to semantic and/or keyword occurrence analysis, and its effect on a site's rankings very co-dependant on other factors. The worse the problem, the greater the need for quality inbound links and other signals of quality to overcome the issue.

Todd Malicoat

Spam sucks.

Rae Hoffman

I think the thing to remember with seo is that when you are developing seo related content and attempting to seo it in the search engines to achieve top seo ranks is that you don't want to overdo the seo to the point that when the page is evaluated the seo comes across and being very obvious, even to someone not in seo. That sentence reads like crap and is overkill - use keywords when and where it makes sense.

Roger Montti aka martinibuster

Yes.

Danny Sullivan

That is, if spotted.

Aaron Wall

I have seen sites with mostly low quality links rank well for fairly competitive phrases. I have also seen sites with cheesy reciprocal link directories not rank until AFTER they pulled the reciprocal link list off their site. Also, the more good links you have the more shady stuff you can get away with.

Ben Pfeiffer

They say they look for paid links with probability models and sophisticated algo tricks. Some sites are easily identified and prevented from passing pagerank. There are plenty of sites however that are not targeted like this and still useful for buying links from. I would be random, deliberate, and dont' follow the crowd when buying links.

Joost de Valk

Might disable your outbound link quality...

Scottie Claiborne

When caught, the whole network can be taken out quickly. It's very risky. I don't see an issue with selling links in some instances, though. When they are 3 inches thick in the footer and totally unrelated, yes, I think it can cause harm.

Wil Reynolds

I think this is reviewed or more of an individual basis.

Mike McDonald

Potentially negative. Depends on whether or not you get caught.

Michael Gray

if the only links you have are from link farms it reflects negatively. Selling links is generally only a problem for hand reviews (manual ban) otherwise outbound links are maginalized.

DazzlinDonna

This is an "if you get caught" scenario.

Debra Mastaler

*schemes* = bad. Selling = not bad.

Guillaume

Hard to catch in French (from all the sites we're working on)

Will Critchlow

Potentially strongly detrimental. If you're not spotted, it can't be detrimental (until it is spotted).

Lucas Ng (aka shor)

A little sensationalized IMO. Google will attempt to identify low quality link-selling neighbourhoods just as it would identify any low quality link neighbourhoods. There should be few ranking problems with buying a relevant on-topic link - it's called advertising... At the 2007 Australian Search Summit Adam Lasnik from Google told the crowd he is "perfectly fine with people buying and selling links" (he did mention he'd prefer if we use no-follow on these links).

Marcus Tandler

there seem to be some penalties applied manualy in the last few month

Natasha Robinson

More Google FUD

Chris Boggs

have not tired this with client sites.

Caveman

Done right, can greatly improve a site's rankings. Done overly enough, it can even get a site banned.

Todd Malicoat

If you can't explain it to Matt - you probably shouldn't do it.

Rae Hoffman

Depends on how you're doing this. It could not hurt you at all, or it could kill you. Dependent upon your methods and execution.

Roger Montti aka martinibuster

This is controversial. I believe they are using statistical models to identify link schemes. So thinking about that is important, imo.

Thomas Bindl

slower crawl, but no influence to ranking

Ben Pfeiffer

Crawlers operate within milliseconds, just be sure your site is able to be crawled as often as needed.

Debra Mastaler

depends on the quality of the elevator music played.

Lucas Ng (aka shor)

Limits the crawlerability of the site.

Scottie Claiborne

Over time, this can be an issue. Every once in a while, I doubt it hurts anything.

Michael Gray

only if the problems occur on repeated crawls

Chris Boggs

again would not know this.

Caveman

Since you said "very slow" we'll give this a 2, but the problem as to be rather severe. This is more an in or out indexing issue AFAIK.

Todd Malicoat

One piece in the puzzle - but it's a pretty easy one to keep an eye on. A slow server is not a great sign that your site is important.

Roger Montti aka martinibuster

This hasn't been an issue for me during times when server load caused inability to serve content. I think this might be because of better sharing of data between the different crawlers.

Jonah Stein

This is threshold sensitive. If a majority of the links are from spam sites it is detrimental.

Scottie Claiborne

I think inbound links from spammy sites can hurt a new/untrusted site, but don't believe they have any effect on a trusted site.

Aaron Wall

If you have a new site and most or all of your links are from spam sites it might be hard ever earn trust in Google. Older sites with many trusted links can get away with having many more spam links. It is more about the ratio of good links to bad links than the exact number of bad links.

Lucas Ng (aka shor)

If Google identifies a page with a low signal-to-noise ratio (low quality vs. high quality links), its very likely that page will have its link juice diminished or discounted/

Barry Schwartz

depends on number

Eric Ward

By itself, meaningless, but as a potential signal/indicator of overall behavior, useful.

Michael Gray

If the only links are from non trusted sites this counts as a negative

Ben Pfeiffer

Can't harm you.

Debra Mastaler

If they're the ONLY links - not good. But if you have a mixed bag then it's not going to send you to the twilight zone.

Will Critchlow

At least *should* not inhibit crawling nor harm rankings. Otherwise leaves attacks open. I have heard rumours of attacks but have no first-hand experience of this.

Marcus Tandler

Depends on the overall ratio. A trusted site can survive a few spammy inbound links

Chris Boggs

Only if a pattern develops and it can be definitely pinned on the site, not the competitor linking to the site, I would hope. We do test for this when seeing a drop in rankings.

Caveman

Marginally important. Certain sets of circumstances can cause issues. But IMO, sometimes these links can also be helpful. Google likes to say your competitors can't hurt you. We know better.

Todd Malicoat

Everybody have scraper links - not everybody has 10k blogspam links. SE's don't really like to encourage blogspam, and likely have threshholds to discover/ stop it.

Rae Hoffman

If you're lacking good links and have loadsof bad ones, you're going to see issues. If you have them in addition to links with good qualities, from trusted sites and have valid traffic/popularity footprints, you won't see as much of an issue.

Roger Montti aka martinibuster

They just don't count. Do a backlink search restricted to dot info on any top ranked site.

Eric Enge

Caveat: If your visits are low compared to similarly placed competition, this may be detrimental, and certainly will be so in a big way in the future.

Aaron Wall

Usage data is one sign of quality. If a site lacks that it may need to make up for that with other signs of quality.

Will Critchlow

I believe this will be the big change in our industry - the increase of this kind of effect.

Andy Hagans

This is future looking.

Wil Reynolds

Don't know

DazzlinDonna

This is a guess only. Call it a gut feeling.

Laura Lippay

Low compared to what...

Chris Boggs

We have seen sites that gained lots of traffic via PPC or banners experience a boost, but hard to pinpoint if it is because of that factor.

Caveman

Lots of high quality niche sites have low visitor numbers. In fact, we have a bunch of those. Non-issue.

Todd Malicoat

People don't like your site? Why would engines want to send you visitors and sully their good name with your garbage?

Rae Hoffman

Depends on the ratio of inbound links to these factors, in my opinion.

Roger Montti aka martinibuster

I think time spent on site has more importance. This could mean you have a screwed meta description, but not necessarily bad content.