The Top 3 Google Ranking Factors That Really Matter
If only SEO was as simple as having a list of ranking factors that Google applies to its algorithm.
If only SEO was as simple as Google having one algorithm.
If only every niche and location were ranked in the same way.
Long gone are the days when search engines operated on a basic level, where keyword stuffing and a volume of links were obviously direct factors that impacted ranking. Oh, and there was only one algorithm to worry about.
Over the last 25 years, SEO has become an increasingly complex and nuanced discipline.
Ranking factors differ by the vertical and the keyword. YMYL rankings are handled differently from how ecommerce transactional queries are ranked, and local search is different again.
There is only one certainty with SEO: the more you know, the more you realize you don’t know.
There isn’t an official Google ranking factors blueprint or checklist that you can follow. But, what we do know is that there are some factors or signals that Google considers important for ranking pages.
The 3 Ranking Factors That Every SEO Pro Should Focus On
1. High-Quality Content
The first stage of ranking is to understand the user’s query.
The second stage is to match the query to the content on a page.
From How Search Works : “Our systems analyze the content to assess whether it contains information that might be relevant to what you are looking for.”
As long as your site is technically sound enough to be crawled and rendered, quality content continues to be the number one ranking factor.
Content is key not just for ranking, but also for user experience and conversion.
Gary Illyes from Google summarizes this by saying: “Without content it literally is not possible to rank. If you don’t have words on page you’re not going to rank for it. Every site will have something different as the top 2 or 3 ranking factors.”
The internet is literally built from pages of content.
But what is high-quality content? In short, it can best be defined as content that follows E-E-A-T signals, and it demonstrates:
Read more about E-E-A-T below.
An integral part of content are the keywords and words on the page. There are theories circulating that keywords are now obsolete and not needed anymore to rank. But, on a fundamental level, keywords do still matter.
As Google says , “The most basic signal that information is relevant is when content contains the same keywords as your search query. For example, with web pages, if those keywords appear on the page, or if they appear in the headings or body of the text, the information might be more relevant.”
A page must identify what it is about clearly to avoid any ambiguity and to be ranked.
Pedro Dias , a former Googler, explained in a direct conversation: “It’s not that original ranking factors like keywords are obsolete, they are the cornerstone on which we build. It’s just as important as always that these fundamentals are applied and done well.”
Pedro went on to say: “Google has introduced machine learning that is applied on top of the foundations so that they can provide results that take into account far more nuanced intents for queries.”
Google is striving to always surface the best results, so machine learning systems have been developed as part of the move towards parsing natural language queries. Google can understand the difference between “cheat” as a disingenuous person and “cheat” as a way to game a system (as in cheat code). An example Pedro highlighted that Gary Illyes once used.
We can’t mention content and keywords without talking about entities, which Google is using to better understand topics. This article explains in depth why it’s essential to understand entities in SEO.
As explained by Ammon Johns: “Search engines have placed more emphasis on semantic search and entities. For the simplest kind of example, search for ‘History of Munchen’ and not only will Google understand the misspelling of MüNCHEN, but it will almost certainly mostly show results with the more popular ‘Munich’ keyword in the titles and snippets.”
The systems that have the most impact on ranking content are as follows:
Helpful Content System
Launched in 2022 , Google’s helpful content system is focused on providing the best content to the user.
Google’s motivation is for content to demonstrate real-world experience, which circles back to providing the best experience for the reader: “more content by people, for people .”
The system is being updated constantly, and in 2023, we have been through several iterations of updates.
Google states: “The helpful content system aims to better reward content where visitors feel they’ve had a satisfying experience, while content that doesn’t meet a visitor’s expectations won’t perform as well.”
A few of the guidelines for helpful content , which all underline E-E-A-T, include:
RankBrain
Launched in 2015 , RankBrain is one of Google’s machine learning systems that can connect words to concepts and helps Google understand the intent of a search query.
This is part of the rank refining where Google will try to return the most relevant results to a query. It also allows Google to return results for queries with no previous record of searches.
Before RankBrain, Google didn’t understand synonyms and would return literal interpretations of a word. From Google : “…before we had advanced AI, our systems simply looked for matching words. For example, if you searched for “pziza” – unless there was a page with that particular misspelling, you’d likely have to redo the search with the correct spelling to find a slice near you…Now, with advanced machine learning, our systems can more intuitively recognize if a word doesn’t look right and suggest a possible correction.”
BERT
In 2018 , BERT created waves in the SEO industry as a significant update for Google that was reported to impact about 10% of search queries at the time.
The system understands how combinations of words can have different meanings, especially stop words. This makes even so-called stop words relevant in search when they contribute to the meaning of a query.
From Google : “BERT was a huge step change in natural language understanding, helping us understand how combinations of words express different meanings and intents.”
Multitask Unified Model (MUM)
In 2021, at Google IO , MUM was announced as a system to take things a step further by being multimodal, which allows it to take information from text, images, and possibly video.
MUM is not applied as a ranking system across all verticals, as Google said: “While we’re still in the early days of tapping into MUM’s potential, we’ve already used it to improve searches for COVID-19 vaccine information.”
It would appear that the main application is going to be for search that can contain text and images in Google Lens.
Google states: “As we introduce more MUM-powered experiences to Search, we’ll begin to shift from advanced language understanding to a more nuanced understanding of information about the world… MUM is capable of both understanding and generating language.”
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Content Freshness
Caffeine was introduced in 2010 and was a move away from refreshing the entire index every few weeks. Google’s stated purpose for Caffein was to “analyze the web in small portions and update our search index on a continuous basis, globally.”
As the internet was rapidly expanding, in 2011 , Google built on top of Caffeine and introduced “Freshness” by announcing: “…today we’re making a significant improvement to our ranking algorithm that impacts roughly 35 percent of searches and better determines when to give you more up-to-date relevant results for these varying degrees of freshness.”
Content freshness is not applied across all searches. It’s query-dependent and more critical for some niches and queries. For example, think breaking news results, weather, or stock prices.
Most content will see some level of decay over time in search results if it isn’t updated. Ideas, concepts, products, and information are all constantly evolving, and users’ changing expectations are aligned with that.
Personalization & Locality
Although not concerned with quality of content, it’s worth mentioning here that on top of all the other rank refining is a layer of personalization, which takes into consideration user search history and user location.
For example, queries such as “best coffee shop” are considered location-dependent and will deliver a map of results based on your location. Some product queries are served by location to surface local suppliers.
Results for the same query can differ on each device, and knowing the motivation a user might have at a certain stage in their journey makes a difference in what results should be served in the SERPs.
As an example, the query “London Zoo” serves desktop results with an emphasis on research with video and image carousels, while the mobile SERP has a focus on tickets, directions, and location.
As John Mueller said: “If you’re searching on your phone then maybe you want more local information because you’re on the go. Whereas if you’re searching on a desktop maybe you want more images or more videos shown in the search results.”
When you do keyword research and create content, it is important to understand how personalization and locality will impact ranking and take this into consideration in your strategy.
E-E-A-T Is Not A Ranking Factor, But Is Important
Again, not a direct system for ranking, but Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness – E-E-A-T – is a critically important SEO concept that all content creators must take into account.
Google’s Search Quality Raters Guidelines used to be a closely guarded document at Google that was eventually leaked online. Google now openly publishes the document as an example of what its Quality Raters are looking for when they manually review websites.
E-E-A-T is part of the Google Quality Search Raters Guidelines and not so much a ranking factor, but it is a guideline.
E-E-A-T is made up of a series of refining signals that underline everything that Google has been trying to achieve with better user experience and fighting misinformation .
The concept is important for all niches, but especially for anyone in YMYL niches, such as finance or health, where the results can really impact the user’s life in a significant way.
As mentioned above, quality content is a critical ranking factor, and there is no better blueprint to tell you how to achieve that than the E-E-A-T guidelines. Building a credible reputation as an expert within a field supports Google’s aim and provides a good user experience.
2. Page Experience
Page experience caused ripples in the community when it was removed from Google’s ranking systems page, which forced the Search Liaison team to say: “…As our guidance on page experience says in the first sentence: ‘Google’s core ranking systems look to reward content that provides a good page experience.’”
Page experience rolled out in 2021 . Previously to this, Core Web Vitals (CWVs) had been emphasized as an important ranking factor.
CWVs then became part of something bigger in a collective group of ‘signals’ that make up page experience – essentially still a ranking factor, but part of a group of factors now known as ‘Page Experience.’
To understand why this matters is to understand everything that Google wants to achieve.
Google wants to deliver a good user experience. It does not reflect well on its product if it serves pages that take too long to load, don’t load well on certain devices, or are obscured by large ads that obstruct users from getting to the page.
Google says: “Google’s core ranking systems look to reward content that provides a good page experience.”
Page Experience is focused on four main signals:
Page experience is important, but not the most critical factor. In some circumstances, it’s not applied to ranking but is more critical when there are two pages vying for position.
As John Mueller explains: “If all of the content is very similar in the search results page, then probably using Page Experience helps a little bit to understand which of these are fast pages or reasonable pages with regards to the user experience and which of these are kind of the less reasonable pages to show in the search results.”
Google wants to deliver the best product on the market, and this is a critical part of SEO that has been overlooked. Focusing on Google’s motivation and working with this will get you better results for ranking than anything else.
3. Links
Ranking factors and links go hand in hand.
Since Google first launched, SEO professionals have been using links to manipulate rankings. And Google has been fighting link spam to try and improve its results.
Many SEO professionals think that links are being deprecated as a ranking factor. In a 2022 poll by Marie Haynes, 44% of SEOs pros who responded thought that link building was less effective now compared to a few years ago.
If we start by looking at why links have been important historically, in Google Founders Sergey Brin’s and Lawrence Page’s famous Stanford paper , links were given prominence as one of the main factors of ranking in a system that echoed the citations given to academic papers.
In the early days of Google, links quickly became the most leveraged spam technique for ranking. It took Google until 2012 and the legendary Penguin update to wipe out low-quality links, and it has been trying to downgrade the importance of links since this time.
Yet, the first time a Google representative said online that links were a ranking factor was in 2016 . In a Q&A with Ammon Johns and others, Google Search Quality Senior Strategist Andrey Lipattsev said the top 3 ranking signals are “Content, Links, RankBrain.”
Skip forward to 2023; in an AMA at PubCon , Gary Illyes then gave a contradicting opinion to say that links are not a “top 3” ranking signal and haven’t been “for some time…there really isn’t a universal top 3.”?Illyes went on to say, “It’s absolutely possible to rank without links.”
It’s worth considering that there are many reasons why Google would downplay the importance of links, such as to reduce link spam. Google is not going to outright claim that links are a surefire ranking factor if they can be so easily manipulated. Yes, it might be technically possible to rank without links, but more often, links do improve ranking.
In a direct message conversation, Ammon said in response to his 2016 video: “When Andrey Lipattsev responded with ‘Content, Links and RankBrain’, he was saying what matters is on-page, off-page, and how Google processes a query – which is something anyone should have already known. On that basis, no matter what Gary Illyes has said since, those are indeed the three essential factors still today.”
Apart from the flow of PageRank, one of the reasons that links are important is that Google typically finds pages by crawling, and it traverses pages via links.
This is why a page with no inbound or internal links can be difficult to rank, as it it’s not found by Google via links in order to be crawled and indexed. The potential for the absence of links highlights the importance of submitting a sitemap, which tells Google what pages you want indexed.
Internal linking not only helps Google crawl and index all linked pages on your site – it also helps to interlink topic clusters, which is a valuable SEO content strategy.
What is important is that not all links are equal, and Google focuses on the quality of an individual link, not the volume of links.
John Mueller said: “The number of links may have been an important factor during the early days of PageRank, but Google prioritizes more helpful metrics to evaluate links today.”
Links do not have the same impact as they did in the early days when it was possible to rank with a high-volume of low-quality inbound links. Today, relevance and quality of link matter.
Good quality links do still have an influence on ranking, and a lot of SEO professionals would say they do still count.
At this point, we can confidently say that internal links and inbound links are still considered a ranking factor.