You would think that listing all the factors that Google uses to determine your ranking would be a near impossible task, right? Well, apparently not. Today we have your first sneak peek at the list of the almost 200 search engine ranking factors used by Google.

How did this list get started? Well, apparently Mr. Google, Matt Cutts, mentioned at a conference recently that there are over 200 variables in the Google algorithm. So the folks at the WebmasterWorld set themselves a challenge to list them all.

Here is what has been included so far:

Domain

• Age of domain
• History of domain
• Keywords in domain name
• IP address of domain
• Location of IP address / Server

Architecture

• HTML structure
• Use of Headers tags
• URL path
• Use of external CSS / JavaScript files

Content

• Keyword density of page
• Keywords in Title Tag
• Keywords in Meta Description (Not Meta Keywords)
• Keywords in header tags (H1, H2 etc)
• Keywords in body text
• Freshness of content

Per Inbound Link

• Quality of website inbound linking
• Quality of web page inbound linking
• Age of website
• Age of web page
• Relevancy of page’s content
• Location of link (Footer, Navigation, Body text)
• Anchor text of link
• Title attribute of link
• ALT tag of images linking
• Country specific top level domain
• Authority of top level domain (.edu, .gov)
• Location of server
• Authority links (CNN, BBC, etc)

Cluster of Links

• Uniqueness of class C IP address

Internal Cross Linking

• Number of internal links to page
• Location of link on page
• Anchor text of FIRST text link

Penalties

• Over optimisation
• Purchasing links
• Selling links
• Comment spamming
• Cloaking
• Hidden text
• Duplicate content
• Keyword stuffing
• Manual penalties

Miscellaneous

• JavaScript links
• No follow links

Pending

• Performance / Load of a website
• Speed of Javascript

Misconceptions

• XML Sitemap (Aids the crawler but doesn’t help rankings)
• PageRank (General indicator of page’s performance)

If you have additional questions about getting your website ranked higher on Google and how important these factors are to helping your company get more exposure online please contact me and I will be more than happy to help. I can be reached at 208.598.0084 or matt.shifley@yahoo.com.