Google ranking factors with corrections
UPDATE AND SOLUTION: Google is rewriting SERP title tags, Launched in August 2021:
- Google launched this update to provide the best description based on user’s search intent or search behaviour.
- But for all page listed in Google it is not applied as sometimes the meta description itself is the best one.
- With this update, Google is not asking users to remove meta description from the website, this may be a good fit for content pages with different search intent connection.
A recent study by MOZ showed that, on average, Google is rewriting SERP title tags by around 12 words. This means that, if you want your site to rank highly, you need to make sure that your title tag accurately reflects the content of your page.
You can use the free SERP title tag tool by SEO MOZ or others to see how your title tag compares to those of your competitors. If it’s shorter than the majority of other titles, you may want to consider lengthening it.
Keep in mind that the title tag is just one part of your overall SEO strategy, and you should also make sure that your site is properly optimized for other factors such as keyword density, inbound links, and page speed.
UPDATE AND SOLUTION: Google Update on qualifying links and link spam policy, Launched on July 26, 2021:
What are the things you should do to build backlinks after qualifying links and link spam policy update?
You should ensure that following tagging conventions are used when applicable:
Affiliate links: “rel=sponsored”
Sponsored links: “rel=sponsored”
Guest posting: “rel=nofollow”
Never pay for the backlinks and specially for low-value websites backlinks. Low value can be less DA, PA or high negative linked sites.
Never join any link building or link exchange programme. In most of the sites involved in these cases are risky.
Don’t ask for or join any agreement or contract to share backlinks or get backlinks.
Always avoid black hat link building or link generator tools that only bring thousands of backlinks of no value.
UPDATE AND SOLUTION: UPDATE AND SOLUTION: Page Experience Update, Launched in May 2021:
Google updated the page experience parameters to make it more user-friendly and intuitive. Here are few guidelines on page experience update that will help you optimize your website better and achieve good page experience score.
A. Core Web Vitals (CWV) are a set of webpage performance metrics developed by Google. It helps measure and then improve the qualitative user experience. The metrics used under this are:
a. Largest Contentful Paint(LCP) related to page loading speed.
b. First input delay (FID) relates to the delay in initial rendering of the large size content in a webpage. It tries to improve interactivity.
c. Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) relates to visual stability of web page content.
B. Mobile usability: This confirms the requirement of a webpage to be mobile-friendly in all screen sizes.
C. Security Issues: Security issues such as presence of malicious content, malware, non HTTPS URL’s or any other things that create a threat for the users degrade and gradually remove a website from Google.
D. HTTPS usage: The use of SSL is now a compulsion for any website who envision to optimize and gain good search rank in Google.
E. Ad Experience: No more a website owner can host distracting, interrupting or non-conductive to user experience advertising as that will reduce the SEO score of a webpage.
UPDATE AND SOLUTION: In April 2021 Google launched Product Reviews Update. Google recommended content creators to follow a few guidelines in creating product reviews. They are:
1. Provide appropriate and expert knowledge about any product, don’t just leave small information about the product.
2. Proper display through images and videos to show how the product actually looks physically. How it can be used with detailed user guidance to use the product beyond what manufacturer has given.
3. Clear and concise quantitative measurements about the product’s performance in different use conditions.
4. Give proper explanation why the reviewed product stands apart from other similar products.
5. Compare other products feature by feature to provide detailed understanding about the product.
6. Cover the growth and changes that happened with the product like previous models, releases and how that improved it and what issues are resolved with the updates. This should help a buyer decide to buy the item.
7. Explain the decision-making factors for the products category and explain them for the product you are reviewing.
8. Explain the dangers and user safety that your product brings, among other benefits.
9. Engage users to discuss on the user experience and share their experience.
UPDATE AND SOLUTION: Old Domain’s benefit and Myth:
The myth was an old domain is considered to be more trustworthy than to a new one, but in recent times the importance of age count is less in SEO. Now still why I am discussing it because of few following reasons:
- If the site is Old, so site owner must have long-term plans with it.
- Spamming sites or spammers buy and leave domains, and Old sites assure on that point.
- But Age that we are discussing which is available at domain registration and renewal date are not viewed by Google.
- Domains purchased for extended years like ten years gives the same sense of stability and reliability, but Google gives the least importance to it.
- Unused domains can also indicate it to be a parked domain, which is a negative factor.
- If the old domain kept with a 301 redirection, then it is taken as a negative indication.
- The Domain farming companies buy holds and then sell domains showing age as a value, in reality, it holds no value.
- The only factor that hold’s value is content updated and presented at the time of purchase. Google, want to check the contents since its inception, and if that comes good, then you can take the age as a real factor
UPDATE AND SOLUTION: Keyword in Domain:
Keywords used in the Domain to define the ranking back in time, but with Google’s EMD (Exact Match Domain) update it lost its glory. Although, it doesn’t mean at all that keyword should be neglected. Hence, it will be better not just to depend on a keyword phrase. You can see many interesting case studies on EMD domains such as cheapflights.com, lowestairfares.com they have lost the ranking due to EMD update and had to do a lot to bring back the ranking. But I can tell you it still holds some value or importance. In Bing, though any such EMD update is not visible and on Yahoo also we don’t see it, and as they hold good market share, you can keep other domains with your company’s primary Domain as a support line to get few free optimization.
UPDATE AND SOLUTION: Domain Name starts with keyword:
Here you benefit if you keep some other no keyword term followed by keyword term in the Domain, your SERP will help. But do remember that the beginning of a domain with keyword doesn’t do all the work. You will still need to work on its SEO as a regular website. It will just add to your job.
UPDATE AND SOLUTION: Subdomains with keyword:
Here comes your opportunity to build more keyword dependent subdomain under your brand name holding domain. It’s a separate entity than your domain, so they can be ranked. While optimization improves subdomains rank, we can understand the presence of keywords in URL helps this process. It helps you to add additional information on your domain name such as place name, items name, person’s name, etc. Overall, keyword-based subdomains help in overall SEO strategy.
UPDATE AND SOLUTION: The Domain History:
www . arichive . org will give you the history of a site if you see a domain used for a porn site or an illegal business, then do you think it can benefit you? Search engines are continuously checking numerous web pages with all their content and inbound and outbound links on the internet to improve their search result. If they find bad links and bad quality content with bad historical data, the rank of sites can fall. These adverse effects can get corrected with further good work, and back link disavows process.
UPDATE AND SOLUTION: EMD of Exact Match Domain:
Google’s EMD update is no less than a nightmare for niche marketers who used exact keyword matching domain as a tool to win over better sites. The only way to keeps a new and content rich site if you ever purchased such a domain, and now you can’t leave it. Read the Point (1) for detail discussion on EMD and keyword-based domains.
UPDATE AND SOLUTION: Public domain registration VS Private domain registration:
Probably the most controversial topic on SEO rankings factor. Hidden Domain data is not right in my view, as only illegal business owners will do it. Even google’s own domain’s ownership is also easily visible on WHOIS. So, there is no such difference or effect due to this on your SEO.
UPDATE AND SOLUTION: If you are a penalized site owner or optimizer, will your sites face any penalty:
If you are an identified spammer, then stay alerted for all your domains to face the penalty. We are here to make money by business, and Google is also doing the same. If you are a spammer, Google won’t keep you or any of your presence on its site. So, stay safe and play well.
UPDATE AND SOLUTION: Country-based TLD:
Yes .in domains are more preferred in India than us and likewise .uk domains are more preferred in the UK. So, it’s obvious that Google will give preference to country-based TLD for local and region-specific businesses.
UPDATE AND SOLUTION: Title with Keyword:
Title holds a critical place in SEO because it is clearly visible in any search engine’s result. From that location, search engines pull up relevant terms as keywords. Here a factor called keyword manipulation also done, so be careful of stuffing keywords in it than maintaining a proper and healthy sentence.
UPDATE AND SOLUTION: Description carries keyword in it:
Description is that place where you can keep 165 characters, and in that, you can mention keywords and a little description of the page as well. Here you can also place phone number or contact details if needed. A search engine gives importance to this place, and that’s why placing keywords in it benefit the website
UPDATE AND SOLUTION: Keyword Appears in H1 Tag:
Although the importance of header tag, i.e. H1-H6 are reducing, and they no longer provide the same value to a page as it used to do before. As per latest Google crawling behaviour, the usage of the tag scene in 60% of sites for ranking the URLs. Most sites don’t even use keywords in title tags. Now search engines check the content and then analysing the same ranks the sites. For ON-Page SEO it is going to stay but don’t have much impact as before.
UPDATE AND SOLUTION: Use of Keyword in Body of a Web Page, How Google tackle keyword spamming or stuffing?
- Tf-if stands for term frequency-inverse document frequency, have you ever heard of it? Used in retrieving information and mining text.
- Formulae:
I. TF(t) = (Number of times term t appears in a document) / (Total number of words in the text).
II. IDF(t) = log_e(Total number of documents / Number of documents with term t in it). - Content with 100 words with three repetitions of the cat name. The term frequency (tf) for cat is 3/100 = 0.003. Now in 10 Million documents, cat word appeared for 1000 times. Then its inverse document frequency (IDF) is calculated by 10000000/1000 = 4. And now the Tf-IDF weight is the product of these quantities: 0.03*4=0.12.
- Now this formula gives a measurement of importance by comparison of the frequency of keyword appearance compared to expected rate of appearance.
- Case Study: When comparing “SEO company in Kolkata” and “SEO company” we found “SEO company” mentioned in many places and “SEO company in Kolkata” present in only one or two times. We can conclude “SEO company in Kolkata” qualifies as “SEO company’s” presence threshold is much higher.
- Final Output: So, in SEO, the measurement of TF-IDF’s correlates with more top rankings when it performs only moderately better than individual keyword usage.
UPDATE AND SOLUTION: Content-Length:
Here we will start our discussion with few studies done by other leading web search and analytics companies.
- “In 2012, SERPIQ analysed the top ten results for some keywords in Google. From the data, it concluded that the average content length for these results was at least 2,000+ words.” SERPIQ.
- “MOZ did a similar analysis of the top content on its site. After studying over 3,800 blog posts, it concluded that the best performing posts had a length of over 1,500 words.” MOZ
“Another study by MOZ found that there is a strong correlation between the length of the content and the number of backlinks it gets.” MOZ - “Medium.com agrees – digging through its data, it found that content that takes around 7 minutes to read gets the most attention. Making it 1400 to 2100 word content help.” Medium.com
- Reaching a point where we can tell that shorter than 1500 words will not give you lot of search traffic and longer than 2500 words may lose audience interest.
- Understand, then write, why more extended contents favoured because they offer information that needs such words to explain. Now if you are just pumping words to increase length with no depth or real quality, then it will not benefit you. So, you must use few following things:
You must use these factors to strengthen your point:
i) Bullet points and numbered lists
ii) Short paragraphs 2-3 sentences
iii) Use images and videos
iv) Use headings and subheadings
UPDATE AND SOLUTION: Latent Semantic Indexing Keywords in Content (LSI) Keyword:
LSI looks for synonyms of the title of your page. It’s not worded by word synonym, dear. For example, if the title of a page is “top 100 SEO companies in India” the page should have companies names as well such as “Extensive Ideas, ranking by SEO or others.”
- Add value to it by adding italicized, bolded, and H1 tagged words while keeping a live connection to subjects relevant to your title.
- It doesn’t affect squeeze page due to its intention of not optimizing or minimalistic content.
- It keeps content relevant and productive with quality reference.
- Don’t overuse keywords in the content body.
- You can even check google webmaster to see which keywords your pages are ranking and then add LSI factor to it in accordance of the ranked keywords
UPDATE AND SOLUTION: Page Loading Speed:
Google and Bing both use this factor to rate web pages. Google long back indicated that site’s speed is a ranking factor. Every single page has different loading time, and that depends on the content. As SEO now done on page level than domain level, fast loading pages are essential for their good performance. Now how to achieve it:
- A fast loading server.
- A CDN in use like maxcdn or use of a cloud like an Amazon.
- Use Gzip compression to compress CSS, HTML, and JavaScript.
- Minify or optimize the CSS, HTML and JavaScript removing space, comma and random character and sometimes even line breakups. Use YUI Compressor code comments, formatting, and unused code.
- Check your speed at http://www.webpagetest.org/ or https://tools.pingdom.com
- Maximize HTML reduces others, this aspect applied on AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) the new search technology adaptation where you see only HTML pages and CSS; JS not kept in those pages. So, if you can keep the least amount of CSS, js, and other heavy scripts, avoid bootstrap and large images they’re increasing page speed will never be a matter of worry.
UPDATE AND SOLUTION: Content Duplicity, a fight against content piracy:
Now with 7 Trillion pages and single language to support the battle for original content, the only hope how creative you are as a writer, thinker, and adapter. Adapting and knowing latest technological or trade or choice wise changes help you to build unique content as a pioneer. Now what are the content duplicity issues most discussed are:
- The e-Commerce websites have duplicate products, solve this with enough unique content per page. Just make different options available like discount percentage, date required to deliver, site scheme and choice of alternative products. Keep proper canonical with updated and least matching HTML. Now overuse of canonical is also not liked by Bing, so if you have product pages which are sold out, it’s better to remove them from the live list of products but don’t delete them forever as the seller might need to return with products. But that’s difficult to achieve, as you then would be removing a live ranked page. Now considering this you can keep these pages with the statement such as post requirements for future delivery. Try it and inform us about the changes it’s causing on your site.
- Content in your WordPress site can duplicate in this way:
A. http: // www . extensiveideas- test . com / SEO -optimization
B. HTTP : // extensiveideas-test . com/SEO-optimization
C. HTTP : // extensiveideas-test . com/tag/SEO
D. http : // www. extensiveideas-test . com/tag/SEO
E. HTTP : // extensiveideas-test . com/category/SEO
F. http : // www. extensiveideas-test . com/Category/SEO
G. HTTP : // extensiveideas-test123.com/SEO-post (External website)
The parts of any WordPress website that should not index in search engines are Tags, Categories, Author, Archive, etc. Even question tag and categories should not also get indexed. You can easily prevent them in your SEO plugin by making them “no-index.” Like the one, we are showing for the Yoast SEO plugin below.
- If you have a Question and Answer sites where people tend to copy and paste answer from other’s sites there you can do these following things:
A. Add “no index or no follow” tag to stop duplicate contents.
B. Another way is to point the ownership of the content to the original owner or site by rel=canonical. But be careful while giving ownership to any other site and do it not always.
C. Keep maximum original answer. If you keep a maximum number of original content or answer, then few duplicates will not harm.
UPDATE AND SOLUTION: Rel=Canonical:
It defines the ownership of content. In the process, you can mention the ownership of content in your site to any author or even to any website as well. For e-commerce sites where one product sold on multiple sites, then it comes as a help. So if you have a large amount of same data on your website, you can canonicalize them to inform Google about their originality.
UPDATE AND SOLUTION: Date of Content Updates and its latest year status importance:
If you see a content written one or two years ago, then you may not be interested in getting information from it if you have the latest article with you. Google also like updated contents or updated pages.
- It’s the reason that suggests not to delete the old pages on your site but updates them with fresh and up-to-date content. It will not only provide a correlation to the old subject with the latest technology, but also help the user understand the matter in a better way.
- For the same, Google has moved from Caffeine to Hummingbird update. And now Penguin 4.0 (Although it bites differently) but the previous two updates used to check the latest status of the updated contents.
- In a way, helping users to get only those content which is periodically updated to provide the most up-to-date information. So, new pages and links, the rate of document change, inception dates and some other small factors like comments, date/time tags, etc. These are considered necessary. So, a new website is more preferred than to an old one.
UPDATE AND SOLUTION: Historical Updates Page Updates:
A site owner must be super active to provide rich and accurate information to viewers. So with the frequency of page content update with proper chronological update track record provides useful information to users. If you can properly use data markup in your subsequent data markup with appropriate schema, then getting highlighted in top Google search with Snippets is not an impossible task to achieve.
UPDATE AND SOLUTION: Image Optimization:
Images play a vital role in bringing an understanding of your website, business and personality. It is perhaps the only reason social media gained such popularity. Now today’s age needs you to be Image Savvy so best of your capacity can be expressed to your readers and followers. If you want to build a healthy and active image-based personality, then the necessary things that are needed as follows:
- Place images on your server, don’t upload a picture or use URL images from other sites.
- Use a clear and proper ALT tag for every image.
- Upload images in multiple image sharing sites and social media separately and with the page URL which has the image.
- Use image URL like this (HTTP s: // www. arzcellent.com/whatis/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/google-search-ranking-factor.jpg) from your domain and share it across other sites to improve the visibility of the picture under your domain.
- These process will bring your image in Google Images and Other image searches with a point server as your website in most of the cases.
UPDATE AND SOLUTION: Content Update and its Update Date, How much importance it holds while looking for any content or clicking on any URL in Google search result: Whenever we see the time of update of the content, the first thing that strikes us it’s too old to follow or yeah, it’s the latest write lets read it. As a human, we go through this process every time we search for content. Following this rule Search Engines also work accordingly, So, what they look forward from you regarding it:
- The date of the content must be updated. It showcases that we are working on our content and not just dumping the site with content which is left forever as it is.
- Try to understand Google now has 130 Trillion Pages to crawl and update its search data if you don’t refresh the pages it will have someone doing it or someone posting new content on the same topic, their content will get preference over your content. Don’t let this to happen and keep the contents updated.
- Now it’s not any more those days when you can post 100 contents with different keywords in your site, and the site will rank in all of them. Google has started its humanization of the search results. It will look for real answers from your content. Which means, build content that speaks about the solution, not about a hint. Only if your content provides a real solution to any problem with detail data, Google will prefer it, and even users will also like to read it.
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