Google top 10 SEO Ranking

People don’t really understand that there are many different factors that fall into place when determining where a website ranks in the Google search engine results (Google top 10 Results). Some things to keep in mind when you are wondering why your site doesn’t rank well. It is not always just the obvious reasons that are holding it back.

Over the past years by reading Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, Google SEO Starter Guide, many other industry blogs and by actually doing professional SEO and internet marketing since the late 1990’s, I have gathered data and come to a boiled down short list of the most important Google search engine ranking factors.

Here is the list of my top 10 of important Google SEO ranking factors to consider:

1. Age of Domain: Age of URL is very important. If you just bought your domain a few weeks or even months ago you have a long road ahead of you. The reality is the age of your website helps build trust. If your website has been online for several years, chances are you have an established business.

2. Domain Hosting: Where is your site hosted? Find out through your hosting company what continent or country your site is hosted in. This can often times play a large role in search rankings. Always use a reputable hosting company. If your company is US based then use a hosting company in the United States. Also, I always recommend a dedicated IP when you can. There are virtual dedicated and cloud hosting solutions that are more affordable. Never use the cheapest hosting. The reality is, if you cannot afford hosting you should re-consider the business…I know this is harsh but very true.

3. Your Neighbors: If you have a virtual server, which sites like Godaddy usually are have been known to house hundreds of websites on one server. Make sure that your neighbors on your server are not classified as spam.

4. URL Structure: Make sure your URL structures are very clean. There should not be any random strings of characters at the end of your URL’s. This is part of the onsite search engine optimization process as well.

5. Content: Content is very important. To start make sure you have text on all your important pages, then make sure it is good text consisting of your targeted keywords spread throughout naturally. Simply put, ALWAYS write your content for humans, your website visitors first and NEVER write content for the solo purpose to achieve Google search engine rankings. Chances are the content will not be user focused or provide value to your visitors.

6. Internal Link Structure: Make sure your inner pages are linked correctly. Visitors should have easy made pathways connecting to your other pages from every page of your website. Make sure the code of your website is verified and keep flash and JavaScript to a minimum, if you can. Essentially make sure the site is clean, easy to use and interlinked to help the user experience.

7. Trust: Do you at least have a mailing address listed on your website? You should if you don’t. Google likes to see trust factors on websites so anything you can add that could help build trust for your audience will benefit your rankings. I always recommend having a phone number on each page of your website. Make it easy for people to do business with you, it all starts with establishing trust and that starts with contact information on your website.

8. Keywords: Make sure your website is optimized using your keywords. This means any alt tags for images, meta page information and existing content at the very least of things. Remember to naturally optimize your website based on the content of each page of your website.

9. Bounce Rate: Although bounce rate might not seem important if Google sees that nobody hangs out on your website for more than a few seconds before they leave this could be a ranking problem over time. Make changes to get visitors engaged with your website. Simple things, like video, newsletter sign up, call to actions, etc will help improve your bounce rate over time. Make sure you have proper tracking on your website, such as Google analytics.

10. Outbound links: Make sure the websites that you link to are 100% relevant to your business and industry. If you sell animals toys but you are linking to a site that sells shoes that is not very relevant and over time could really impact your rankings. Bottom line is if it makes sense to link to another site, then do so, but remember you could be sending your visitors away from your site.

11. Inbound Links: I know this was a list of my top 10, but I felt I had to mention inbound links. The key here (speaking as a white hat SEO person), don’t buy or exchange links. Market and promote your business online to build visitors to your website over time. If you do, then the relevant links will follow!

**Note: As the Google (and yes there are 2 other major search engines!) algorithm changes there are always new ranking factors that come into play, such as the page load time and many others. I am sure when I re-do this list a year from now, there may be another one or two additional factors.

There are many extensive factors that Google  uses when determining website rankings. Very important to get these factors correct otherwise you could find yourself just spinning your wheels. The bottom line is it is all about relevancy and earning your visitors (and yes Google’s) search engine trust over time.

Great Google's Disavow Tool

Today we’re introducing a tool that enables you to disavow links to your site. If you’ve been notified of a manual spam action based on “unnatural links” pointing to your site, this tool can help you address the issue. If you haven’t gotten this notification, this tool generally isn’t something you need to worry about.

First, a quick refresher. Links are one of the most well-known signals we use to order search results. By looking at the links between pages, we can get a sense of which pages are reputable and important, and thus more likely to be relevant to our users. This is the basis of Page Rank, which is one of more than 200 signals we rely on to determine rankings. Since Page Rank is so well-known, it’s also a target for spammers, and we fight linkspam constantly with algorithms and by taking manual action.

If you’ve ever been caught up in linkspam, you may have seen a message in Webmaster Tools about “unnatural links” pointing to your site. We send you this message when we see evidence of paid links, link exchanges, or other link schemes that violate our quality guidelines. If you get this message, we recommend that you remove from the web as many spammy or low-quality links to your site as possible. This is the best approach because it addresses the problem at the root. By removing the bad links directly, you’re helping to prevent Google (and other search engines) from taking action again in the future. You’re also helping to protect your site’s image, since people will no longer find spammy links pointing to your site on the web and jump to conclusions about your website or business.

If you’ve done as much as you can to remove the problematic links, and there are still some links you just can’t seem to get down, that’s a good time to visit our new Disavow links page. When you arrive, you’ll first select your site.

Google's Disavow Tool - Take a Deep Breath

At Pubcon Las Vegas on Tuesday (10/16), Google's Matt Cutts announced a new tool to disavow links. After absorbing the news for a day, I have some advice – put down the keyboard and the Red Bull and breathe. Breathe in, breathe out, and then repeat.

As Uncle Ben said to Peter Parker, "With great power comes great responsibility, and my rice turns out Perfect Every Time®" – or something like that. My SEO friends are already reporting that their customers are asking to have links removed, and this has the potential to get ugly fast. I think this is, on balance, a good tool (one particularly handsome SEO petitioned Google for a text-file-based disavow back in December of 2011), but it also has the potential for serious destruction.

I. Who Should Use It?

I’m going to write this post backwards, for two reasons. First, if you’ve read about the disavow tool, you’ve already seen how it works, so I’ll save that for last. Second, if you haven’t read about it, I don’t want you to just run off and use it before I get my sermon on. So, sit down in your pew and listen.

Especially now, with almost no data about the tool’s effectiveness, there are really only a few groups of people who should consider using the disavow tool, in my opinion. If you fall into one of these groups, then proceed – with caution…

1. You’ve Received Bad Link Warnings

While people have had mixed reactions to Google’s bad link warnings, and there has been at least one false alarm, bad link warnings in Google Webmaster Tools are currently the only direct signal from Google that they have a problem with your link profile. The warnings look something like this:

If you’ve received a direct warning, you’re pretty sure which links are suspect, and you haven’t been able to get them removed, then the disavow tool may be for you.

2. You’ve Been Manually Penalized

I hesitate to add this one, because determining if you’ve been penalized can be more art than science, but if your site has clearly been hit with a manual penalty, you’re reasonably certain that penalty is link-based, and you haven’t been able to get those links removed, then disavowal may be up your alley.

3. You Were Denied Reconsideration

If you’ve been trying to fix (1) bad-link warnings or (2) a link-based penalty for months, with no success, then disavowal is a logical next step. Google has not been forgiving about these situations, and even if you’ve filed for reconsideration, will often not take action unless the majority of your bad links have been removed. Sometimes, that’s just not feasible, so now you have one more option.

4. You’ve Been Hit By Penguin

Diagnosing Penguin can be a bit tricky, but your best clue is a clear traffic drop on or immediately after April 24, 2012 (the release date of Penguin 1.0). To the best of our knowledge, Penguin primarily targeted aggressive link-building strategies, especially excessive use of unnatural anchor text. If you can fix those links (diversify anchor text and/or remove bad links), that’s your best option, but if you’re still struggling with Penguin then the disavow tool may be useful to you.

Keep in mind that we’re still unclear on the Penguin update cycle, specifically whether you can recover outside of a Penguin data update (and there have only been two of those – May 25, 2012 and October 5, 2012 – as of this writing). Add to this Google’s statements that disavowal could take weeks, and the new tool is far from a magic wand for dispelling Penguins.

This has no real relevance to SEO, but Facebook added a Penguin emoticon this week <("), and it’s the greatest thing ever. Please use it with reckless abandon.

5. You’re a Victim of “Negative” SEO

If you think that you’ve been a victim of a link-based attack (someone has purposely created bad links to harm your site), and you haven’t been able to get those links removed – which is, unfortunately, common in these situations – then disavowal is a new weapon in your arsenal. I hesitate to mention this because negative SEO, while very real, is also very rare. The vast majority (90%+) of people who think they are victims of negative SEO are usually suffering from other SEO problems. So, make sure you’re solving the right problem before you start disavowing links.

II. Which Links Are Bad?

Even if you’re sure that bad links are your problem, discovering exactly which links are bad is an outright perilous journey. Here’s the problem – most links, even low-value links, still help your rankings. So, if you start removing absolutely every questionable link, you could be throwing out a lot of SEO babies out with that polluted bathwater.

Many posts have been written on how to dig into Google Webmaster Tools links, Open Site Explorer, Majestic, etc., and those techniques are incredibly useful, but please be very, very careful. You don’t just want to assign a number to your links based on Toolbar PageRank or Domain Authority and start disavowing everything under some arbitrary limit.

This is a very advanced and difficult topic, but I’m going to try to provide some general advice on pinning down which links might need removing…

1. Assess Your Risk Level

This is step one. If you’re worried about a potential future penalty and are proactively removing links, please do not start taking a hatchet to your link profile. You risk doing a lot of damage to fix a problem that you don’t even have yet. Not to sound conspiratorial, but what is Google going to think when your currently unpenalized site submits 500 links for disavowal?

On the flipside, if you’ve been decimated by a penalty (manual or algorithmic) and lost the majority of your traffic, the downside to cutting out a chunk of links is a lot less. If you’re considering any kind of drastic measure, like completely moving to a new domain, then I’d certainly give the disavow tool a shot.

2. Isolate the Diseased Links

The more you can isolate the diseased portion of your link profile, the more effectively you can target treatment without damaging your site in the process. To do that, you have to understand the nature of your particular disease. For example, if you were hit by Penguin, you might want to start by looking at links with certain exact-match anchor phrases. If you were hit by Negative SEO, then you probably want to target links with anchor text that’s clearly suspicious or out of place.

Let’s look at a real-world example. A while back, Rand decided to challenge the black-hat community to hit SEOmoz with negative SEO, thereby shaving roughly 20 years off of the marketing team’s collective lives. Long story short, SEOmoz survived, but what if we hadn’t? How could we isolate and target the suspicious links?

One of the clearly anomalous phrases this attack tried to rank us for was “dog snuggies”. So, I might start by loading up Open Site Explorer, and clicking on the “Anchor Text” tab. From there, I’d browse the anchor text until the suspect phrase appeared, and then click [+] to see the links using that phrase