Ranking Factors In Google October 2012

Worth a try - even if it's just for a week or so. Never any harm in testing out what is most effective under these changing times. Seems logical to try it.

Scritty

Yeah traffic has taken such a hit that I'm not exactly losing money trying this haha. I'm hoping to see some results!
 
Scritty,
Really great information.
You said that you wanted someone to explain Authenticity. Many people (madoctopus for instance) suspect that Google uses an n-gram analysis, where they compare random n-gram of whatever words. The n-gram is some number of words that is then checked against Google's index.

However, I do not believe Google handles it in this manner, due to the computational needs this would require, inaccuracies etc. and if they do, it must be an n-gram larger than 7. Additionally n-grams do not prevent spun content at all, only a grammar filter could do that. It would, however, prevent really lazily spun content.
 
If you look at the url for this page, the "497405-ranking-factors-google-october-2012-a.html" portion should be 48 characters or less.

Lol...and it's 49! :)

Who would have guessed. 1 char too many.

Scritty
 
Scritty,
Really great information.
You said that you wanted someone to explain Authenticity. Many people (madoctopus for instance) suspect that Google uses an n-gram analysis, where they compare random n-gram of whatever words. The n-gram is some number of words that is then checked against Google's index.

However, I do not believe Google handles it in this manner, due to the computational needs this would require, inaccuracies etc. and if they do, it must be an n-gram larger than 7. Additionally n-grams do not prevent spun content at all, only a grammar filter could do that. It would, however, prevent really lazily spun content.

n-gram - that's the kiddy.

I don't know if this is the case or not. But the analysis of the sites the metrics guys did looked at the content in this manner, but they just did a few hundred thousand sites, and it took 3 months to do

Guessing this is some sort of "text snippet" macro analysis rather than word by word micro analysis.
Most of the stuff I "got", but this one I really am in the dark. What I need is someone just to tell me what's right and wrong here.

End of the day I have nothing against spinning, the complexity of tools is increasing all the time - the cost of getting stuff written is increasing all the time as well as the GDP of places like India and many polynesian and micronesian countries goes through the roof year on year (essp when compared to the stagnant economies of the West), my outsourced content has already gone up 30% in the last 18 months, and it's a trend that looks likely to continue.

Understanding these things and therefore getting the best value for written work sems a pretty important thing - even if it's just "cost" and "R.O.I" analysis for your outsource workers.

Scritty
 
I was thinking about that word count sweet spot, I had a site that was ranking with 2k works on the homepage. I put up another 1500 word article a bit overkill but relevant and it dropped off the serps. I then removed it (only thing I did) and a few days later it was back, it also had a very low keyword density of about 1% after the other article was added. Could have been a coincidence but I don't think so.
 
Authenticity (% unique 3-5 word phrases >60%)
I wish I understood this better. Maybe somebody who understands language and the way that Google works might be able to tell me exactly what this means. It is something to do with the uniqueness of the work and the way that Google parses text in 3 to 5 word blocks or phrases. Once again there are caveats regarding the inclusion or exclusion of stop words and the way in which these blocks are put together.
My shorthand version would be; "Unique content is better".
But I know there are some real experts out there who may well be able to give me and my readers are much better overview of what this actually means. Full disclosure here - I'm not really sure myself.
I'll add that this does not preclude spinning and re-purposing of content. Spinning well and keeping your work readable and contextual seems fine. However it must appear unique when published and meet the language and context rules here as well to add real value to your SEO campaign

Actually I believe this is precisely targeted at spinning and scraped content...scraped and mashed together content, which is then spun, leaves a very CLEAR footprint, which happens to be the LACK of 3-4-5 word phrases.

Use the seoquake toolbar to look at the keyword density on your scraped mashed and spun content, when you get to the bottom of the chart you will see zero to very few 3-4-5 word phrases. It's easy to see and is a HUGE footprint..it screams that the content isn't authentic. After all most people spin at the very least every third or fourth word at the minimum, right? You end up with no 3-4-5- word phrases. FOOTPRINT!!
 
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An excellent read and thanks for sharing your data +rep. The adsense one is most interesting, not least because it can be easily tested and hopefully fixed and i have just the site in mind to try it on.
 
Actually I believe this is precisely targeted at spinning and scraped content...spinning and mashed together content which is then spun leaves a very CLEAR footprint, which happens to be the LACK of 3-4-5 word phrases.

Use the seoquake toolbar to look at the keyword density on your scraped mashed and spun content, when you get to the bottom of the chart you will see zero to very few 3-4-5 word phrases. It's easy to see and is a HUGE footprint..it screams that the content isn't authentic. After all most people spin at the very least every third or fourth word at the minimum, right? You end up with no 3-4-5- word phrases. FOOTPRINT!!

I'm trying to understand what you're suggesting here. The keyword density wouldn't have much to do with google being able to detect it as google does not evaluate pages based upon how often words appear for if that's their "target" or not (at least to a point). Google would not sweep through and select any phrases appearing only 1% to n-gram check, as the likelihood those phrases have anything to do with the keyword are basically zero.

3-4-5 word phrases being FOUND does not indicate that the article is unique or non-unique. For instance (as discussed in another thread), I used the phrase "it would destroy colloquialism". However, this phrase does not appear at any time in Google's index, but is a perfectly valid, totally unique, and specific critique of this method. Google has just never indexed this phrase yet.

As such, the computational needs here would have to be extremely large for any article... my guess is upwards of 20-30 checks of 4-5 word phrases in order to establish any sort of useful information. This would be so computationally heavy, that I suspect Google doesn't use it at all.
 
just got done reading, i basically agree with everything.......but nothing new. except for the stop words in in/outbound links

google has always valued relevancy and quality. hopefully this will encourage the spammers and copy+paste guys
to step their game up. glad it was measured thanks, and rep added
 
Great, interesting, informative post. Thank you!

One question...

Does the "internal link" factor include links in menus and footers?

Realistically, does Google automatically discount the menu? I have wondered this, and never gotten a confident answer from people. It looks like it does separate this off. What if your website has an extensive text-based menu? Does Google count all of those as internal links? Are you by default devaluing your website with this? Should we switch to menu systems that can't be crawled?
 
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Great, interesting, informative post. Thank you!

One question...

Does the "internal link" factor include link's in menus and footers?

Realistically, does Google automatically discount the menu? I have wondered this, and never gotten a confident answer from people. It looks like it does separate this off. What if your website has an extensive text-based menu? Does Google count all of those as internal links? Are you by default devaluing your website with this? Should we switch to menu systems that can't be crawled?

There are different rules for menu and "SWL's" (site wide links). Again - what they are I'm not certain, but I know that they do not carry the same penalty as in text links, So menu's should be safe.

That's not to say that if you code your own site from scratch you couldn't do it in such a way as to confuse the search engine into not knowing what a SWL or navigation link was, but for most of us using Joomla, Drupal or WP or whatever - this is unlikely to be an issue. (as far as I know :) )
 
There are different rules for menu and "SWL's" (site wide links). Again - what they are I'm not certain, but I know that they do not carry the same penalty as in text links, So menu's should be safe.

That's not to say that if you code your own site from scratch you couldn't do it in such a way as to confuse the search engine into not knowing what a SWL or navigation link was, but for most of us using Joomla, Drupal or WP or whatever - this is unlikely to be an issue. (as far as I know :) )

in my experience links above the fold are valued by google
 
I'm trying to understand what you're suggesting here. The keyword density wouldn't have much to do with google being able to detect it as google does not evaluate pages based upon how often words appear for if that's their "target" or not (at least to a point). Google would not sweep through and select any phrases appearing only 1% to n-gram check, as the likelihood those phrases have anything to do with the keyword are basically zero.

3-4-5 word phrases being FOUND does not indicate that the article is unique or non-unique. For instance (as discussed in another thread), I used the phrase "it would destroy colloquialism". However, this phrase does not appear at any time in Google's index, but is a perfectly valid, totally unique, and specific critique of this method. Google has just never indexed this phrase yet.

As such, the computational needs here would have to be extremely large for any article... my guess is upwards of 20-30 checks of 4-5 word phrases in order to establish any sort of useful information. This would be so computationally heavy, that I suspect Google doesn't use it at all.

lol...man i have no clue what an n-gram is. I know what a gram is, but not an n-gram. here is what i mean

Most spinners are set to spin every 3rd or 4th word....how can you have 3-4-5 word phrases when your spinner is spinning at least every third word? If you don't have 3-4-5 word phrases perhaps things look fishy to google.

This isnt the best example because a lot of things are repeated on this page but....

On THIS very page there are 983 UNIQUE 3 word phrases
910 unique 4 word phrases

If this was spun content we would start spinning on the third word and reduce the chance that 3-4-5 word phrases appear.

Go into the regular web and look at some articles, use seoquake to see how many 3-4-5 word phrases there are in those articles
 
There are different rules for menu and "SWL's" (site wide links). Again - what they are I'm not certain, but I know that they do not carry the same penalty as in text links, So menu's should be safe.

That's not to say that if you code your own site from scratch you couldn't do it in such a way as to confuse the search engine into not knowing what a SWL or navigation link was, but for most of us using Joomla, Drupal or WP or whatever - this is unlikely to be an issue. (as far as I know :) )
That is comforting experience :D my site isn't written in Joomla/Drupal/WP but it is based off a CMS (what isn't these days...) and it should be incredibly obvious :) thanks for answering :D
 


% Backlinks with keyword (>1 <33%)

Have at least one incoming back link with the keyword you want to rank for. The thought that springs to my mind here is that one is probably nowhere near enough but it does depend on your niche.
But importantly don't have more than 33% of your back links with the same keyword anchor anywhere in it.

Be aware of composite anchor text that includes many words and repeating the same word in several different anchor text variations Each one will count. It's a mistake I see made time and time again when I'm asked to appraise peoples backlink profile. They have variations of the same word occurs in every variation. Then it's time to say hello to Mr Penguin.

This is interesting and probably the most important factor of all. I discussed this in great details. It is probable, that Google May determine the theme of the page the back link is created on, and then counted this as the achort text.

So this means that anchor text may be the most important thing, it is onlyvery bad if you go over 30%, because it is a property of a spamy link profile. But, maybe the context of the page is what's counts for other 70%.

So, it should be very important for T1 articles to be about anchor text. If one cannot do that, I think it would be the best practice to include anchor as a keyword several times in the text of the article. So Google will know what is this article about.

A good experiment would be, to see do links with generic anchor text, comming from pages about the targeted keyword, woulf increase rank for the targeted keyword.

Let us know what do you think?
 
I see lots of websites these days ranking for competitive phrases, with only a handful of backlinks with the KW in it.

Perhaps authorative backlinks, combined with great onsite optimisation basically create this effect: Google will take the authority of the links, and then use that general authority to uplift what the site is about as a whole.

It makes sense and could really be the future of SEO. But this is only viable in true authority sites. It seems like this could be the future of high-level, competitive niches. Small niches don't need this.
 
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