Top ranking factors ranked by 37 of the world's Top SEO experts

"Recently Rand Fishkin of Seomoz.org brought together 37 of the world's Top SEO experts to tackle Google's Algorithm, the complex formula and methods Google uses to rank web pages. This ranking formula is extremely important to webmasters because finding which factors Google uses to rank their index is often considered the Holy Grail of site optimization"

Check it out. It is very informative.

http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors

 

Superb read...

 

they say subfolders /// shouldn't be more than 4... I have 6 in some places... wonder if thats a problem... can anyone please explain?

 

the interesting thing about that article is that the tops minds in this industry disagree a lot about the ranking factors.......they all place different emphasis on the factors

 

I still think that it is more of an psuedo-empirical test. Just look at the SERPS for "Buy Viagra" if Googles algo was so ALL knowing and powerful, you would think that it would be able to do something about this .EDU spam.

 

I've been offline for a few years. I am trying to get caught back up on Google. I've used subfolders and subdomains before. One or two levels deep is about all I've ever messed with. Look at the success and page rank of some .50megs other site and blog hosting sites. One or two levels deep doesn't seem to hurt.

My rule of thumb with Google worries is to check out their SERPS for the answer. Check out the megasites. It may take a while to find sites with directory listings that deep but it would answer your question for sure.

 

There are only 10 positive factors and 10 negative factors, where are the other 27?

 

excellent read...thanks for the link

 

Excellent read thanks.

 

It depends on the depth of the link from the main page, not how many subfolders you've got .. Its advisable not to be more than 3-4 levels for best performance. Also I recommend that people should have well organized directory structure ... looks neat

I hope this answers your question.

Cheers,

Venetian.

 

This is a very interesting and helpful read... makes me want to shout, "ANYONE WANTS TO LINK TO MY WEBSITE?!"

 

haha, good one ham! Let me join

LINK TO ME BEFORE YOU GET SLICED!

 

nice info. very interesting and informative.

Now who wants to link? lol

 

very useful information. but there are still some part i dont understand coz i'm still too new to this SEO industry...

 

yeah, so basically if I have blog with allot of categories it doesn't matter since its well linked and organized, correct?

 

Exactly!

That thing was mentioned in the article as guidelines for new websites to make it more SE accessible. When you have incoming links for internal pages this rules change drastically. Yes its good to link back to internal pages. This shows some good quality for that page and if the same page has good number of internal links it would rank on the top

Cheers,

Venetsian.

 

great read. thanks for sharing with us

 

Its sweet, because i knew every single one of those things, and I have not been dubbed an expert. I should write a book.

 

Thanks for sharing.

 

From a SEO viewpoint, many subfolders will make a long URL length. Although there is no bench mark references to this, I reduced my 4 deep tree to 2 and my "deep indexing" and PR went up.

As from a web site design stand point, there is never a reason to go below 2 levels unless it is an extreamly large site. The rule of thumb is that the first level subfolder is the keyword phrase or category. And the home page design is the limiting factor on how many first level subfolders there will be (Google states ~100 max).

But it becomes ugly with that many links. By having a good CSS Navigation system or a "list box of subfolder links" can get around this.

One other note, I have a 8 year old site that has 6 levels deep and todate, 4 is the deepest Google will go on indexing.

And finally, from a competitive SEO standpoint, have all the SEOed "landing pages" in the root directory level with the keyword phrase as the file name (search-engine-optimization.txt). Only use Hyphens (-).

Oh, if you move the lower level up, leave the existing content in place until you see Google index them. Only then, remove them. I'm using a "nofollow" on the link instead of removing them. This should block the Duplicate Content issue but still give you a fall back option if something goes wrong.