The Complete List of Google’s Ranking Factors 3 at TGC

There are over 200 factors for which Google ranks websites on the organic search results. We intend to go over most of them in an unofficial complete list.  Here are a few of them

PAGE LEVEL FACTORS 2

1. Duplicate Content: Identical Content on the same site can affect a web page ranking and results. This is often confused with the same content on another site. For duplicate content, having the same content with very slight variations can affect the overall credibility of the site to the search engines. This often occurs in news sites where more than one person uploads content from different locations.
2. Canonical Tags: Using the right canonical tag and sticking to it, is very important when it comes to websites. Use either http://www or http:// for your web pages and stick to a single one. This would prevent the search engines from assuming that you have duplicate content on a site.
3. Website chrome Behavior: If you intend to rank for Google searches, it is very important to know how your websites behave in the chrome browser because Google uses user chrome data also to rank websites. Chrome takes into account, account server speed, CDN usage, and other non HTML related site speed signals.
4. Image Optimization: File name, alt text, title, description, and caption on images go a long way in determining their relevance to a search engine.  Images are seen as codes to the search engine robots so all these tags are much more important than the actual picture.
5. Recency of Updates: How frequently a website is updated is captured by Google caffeine especially for time-sensitive searches like news. For non-news sites, the frequency of updates helps improve the credibility of the website.
6. Content Edit and Changes: The freshness and relevance factor of a website can be improved by constant edit and changes in the content. These changes may include adding or removing entire sections and even switching around the order of the words sometimes.
7. Page Update:
   Web content needs to be updated over time and Google robots check for updates to web content for a particular keyword in relation to other sites that rank for the same keywords.
8. Keyword in the first 200 words:  The presence of the keywords in the first 100 words is a very important ranking criterion for search engines.
9. Keywords in H2, H3 Tags: The presence of keywords in all the header tags help a site’s ranking, this must, however, be done without keyword stuffing. Pay attention to the keyword density based on the number of words contained in a web page. Once the keywords appear stuffed to the crawlers, the website may be penalized.
10. Keyword Word Order: Google is presently making updates to the search algorithms to ensure that sites with an exact match to the keywords don’t rank as much as it used to when compared to other sites that just simply have a phrase relating to the keywords. However exact match keywords still rank better.