173 Rules for Improving Your Google Listings

PUBLISHED: iMedia Connection, Jan 13, 2011

Some people believe Google has 200 rules for ranking websites. If you knew all of them you would be No. 1 for any search term you wanted, and you’d get rich really fast and buy an island somewhere and retire. We’d all like that, so over the last few months, members of the LinkedIn discussion group, SearchEngineLand, have been working to compile this “Magic 200 List.” So far they’re up to Rule 300, but there are duplicates, and a few silly ones (some of us doubt if Google really cares who you vote for), so here are the best 173.

I’ve split the list into a positive and a negative group. Positive factors will improve your rank, while negative factors will decrease it (or get your site blacklisted). Both groups are further divided into five categories: code, copy, site, links, and behavior. Code factors relate to how the site is coded, plus some aspects of server admin and ancillary files such as XML sitemaps. Copy factors are about the visible copy people read, but the most important rule is merely this: relevant content and lots of it! Site factors relate to the domain and hosting arrangements. For example, just like buying a car, do you know what people did with that domain name before you bought it? Does it come with a reputation? Link factors are for the link-building fraternity (internal link structures are in the code section). Finally, behavior is about how people react to your site (including Google staff, who are people too). Yes — Google is watching, and how people react to your site affects your listings.

There is no way of knowing how many of these factors really do matter, or if there are others. Personally, I think most are correct, and all of them are worth serious consideration. If you’re in the SEO business, you might want to test how many of these are in your toolkit.

Factors which improve search engine results:

Code

1. Search terms in the <TITLE> tag.
2. Search terms in <B> or <STRONG>.
3. Search term in anchor text in links to a page.
4. Search term in image names.
5. Search term in image ALTs.
6. Search terms the first or last words of the Title Tag.
7. Search terms in the page name URL (e.g. acme.co.uk/folder/searchterm.html).
8. Use of hyphen (“-“) or underscore (“_”) in search terms in URL (ie: search-term.htm is better than searchterm.htm).
9. Search terms in the page folder URL (e.g. acme.co.uk/search-term/page.html).
10. Search terms in the first or last words in the H1 Tag .
11. Search terms in other <H> tags.
12. Search terms in the page’s query parameters (e.g. acme.co.uk/page.html?searchterm).
13. Search terms (and location) in the meta description tag.
14. XML sitemap.
15. XML sitemap under 10K.
16. Accuracy of XML sitemap.
17. Sitemap folder geotargeting.
18. Index/follow meta tags.
19. txt present.
20. URL length.
21. Title attribute of link.
22. W3C compliant html coding.
23. Video header and descriptions.
24. Video sitemap.
25. Compression for size by eliminating white space, using shorthand notation, and combining multiple CSS files where appropriate. GZIP can be used..
26. Use CSS sprites to help to consolidate decorative images.
27. No redirection to other URLS in the same server.
28. <NOSCRIPT> tags (even though I don’t know anyone who doesn’t have JavaScript enabled).
29. Geo meta tags if the business serves a targeted geographic area..
30. Relevance of <TITLE> tag to page content.
31. Relevance of <META DESCRIPTION> to page content.
32. Code-to-text ratio.
33. Canonical URL.
34. Directory depth.
35. Number of querystring parameters.
36. Link attributes – like rel=nofollow.
37. Link structure.
38. Microformats.
39. Mobile accessibility
40. Page size.
41. Page accessible.
42. Page internal popularity (how many internal links it has).
43. ALT Image Meta Tags (this can be helpful for FLASH elements too).
44. Age of prominent / 2nd level Pages.

Copy

45. The most important rule of all: plain old simple quality relevant content.
46. Keyword density.
47. Keyword proximity – number of words between search terms (less is better).
48. Keyword positions in page.
49. Keyword prominence (ie: start/end of paragraphs or sentences).
50. Words in page.
51. Page category (or theme).
52. Relevance (to searched phrase).
53. Synonyms to query terms.
54. Language.
55. Linear distribution of search terms.
56. Legality of content.
57. Frequency of updates.
58. Standard deviation of search terms in the population of pages containing search terms.
59. Semantic relevance (synonym for matching term).
60. Rich snippets.
61. Rich snippet UGC rating.
62. Search term density through body copy (about 3 – 5%).
63. Search terms in internal link anchor text on the page.
64. Search terms in external link anchor text on the page.
65. Search terms in the first 50-100 words in html on the page.

Site

66. Length of contract for ownership of domain name.
67. Domain registration information hidden/anonymous.
68. Site top level domain (geographical focus, e.g. com versus co.uk).
69. Site top level domain (e.g. .com versus .info).
70. Sub domain or root domain?
71. Domain past records (how often it changed IP).
72. Domain past owners (how often the owner was changed).
73. Domain IP.
74. Domain external mentions (non-linked).
75. Geo-targeting settings in Google Webmaster Tools.
76. Domain registration with Google Webmaster Tools.
77. Domain presence in Google News.
78. Domain presence in Google Blog Search.
79. Use of the domain in Google Analytics.
80. Server geographical location.
81. Server reliability / uptime.
82. PageRank of a page (the actual PageRank, not the toolbar PageRank).
83. The PageRank of the entire domain.
84. The speed of the web site.
85. Reputable hosting company.
86. Geo located results.
87. Search terms in the root domain name (searchterm.com).
88. An active adsense campaign.
89. Domain age (older is better).
90. The number of pages on the topic related to the search term.
91. Wikipedia listing?
92. Listed in DMOZ?
93. # of pages within site (more is better).
94. Website size (bigger is better).

Links

95. Page external popularity (how many external links it has relevant to other pages of this site).
96. Quality of link partners.
97. Diversity of link partners.
98. Links from good directories.
99. Rate of new inbound links to your site.
100. Relevance of inbound links – subject-specific relationship with target page.
101. Placement of backlinks in page.
102. Quantity of backlinks.
103. Quantity of linking root domains.
104. Quality of linking root domains.
105. Link distance from higher authority sites.
106. Outgoing followed links from back linked pages.
107. Domain classification of linking domains.
108. Outbound links with keywords.
109. PageRank of outbound link targets.

Behaviour

110. SERP click thru rate. If your website is ranked #1 for “bike shoes” but 90% of the traffic goes to the website ranked #2, Google will notice and make an adjustment.
111. Search trend data.
112. Social graph fans (they like/follow you).
113. Social graph fans earned impressions (they talk about you).
114. Social graph fans earned impressions with links (talk about and cite your content).
115. Secondary fan connection citations earned impressions.
116. Secondary fan connection citations earned impressions (retweets, likes of friends).
117. Other citations (social media linking).
118. Visits (personalization).
119. Visits (scraped from Alexa).
120. Number of SERP click-throughs.
121. Visitors’ demographics.
122. Visitors’ browsing habits (which other sites they tend to visit).
123. Visiting trends and patterns (like sudden spiked in incoming traffic).
124. User Experience – “human raters” – a large number (thousands) of Google employees are there solely to check and manually tweak search results.

Factors which can reduce your search results

Code

125. Lack of designed 404 page.
126. Number of links a page is from home page.
127. Server calls, images, JavaScript, database calls (affects speed of website).
128. Badly done redirects.
129. Duplicate title/keywords
130. Redirect thru refresh meta tags
131. Dynamic pages
132. Links with ? in them
133. Use of frames
134. Use of cookies
135. Excessive cross linking
136. Cloaking
137. Excessive use of graphics
138. JavaScript navigation (Googlebot can’t run JavaScript)
139. Comment spamming
140. Use of display none within CSS
141. Use of -9999px within CSS
142. Use of absolute positioning
143. Use of tables
144. Use of the <blink>tag
145. Slow site architecture. If your site build in such a manner that the robots can’t crawl it without losing too much time, some pages won’t get indexed.
146. Deep site architecture. The further down a page is, the less chance it will get found. If it is found it will be visited less often.
147. Duplicate tags on site.
148. Number of links on page (too many will effect adversely).
149. Page file size/load time.

Copy

150. Hidden content or font colors within 10% of background color RBG value.
151. Poison words.
152. Keyword stuffing.
153. Doorway pages.
154. Keyword saturation.
155. Use of words relating to porn.
156. Saying anything remotely negative about Google.
157. Duplicate content on site (Google is “understanding” about ecommerce sites which have duplicate content for multiple products – it will pick one at random and dump the rest, but you won’t be penalized).

Site

158. Over-optimization – if you match what Google is looking for too well, Google will assume you did it just to get better listings and you’ll be penalized. Google considers tuning your site for better listings unethical.
159. Linking between all the domains hosted on same IP.
160. Multiple redirects.
161. Multiple domains to same website (different country variations are acceptable, but not multiple totally different domains, eg: newcars.com, sportscars.com and fastcars.com pointing at the same site).
162. IP address (many are blacklisted for spamming).
163. Whether the site has been previously de-indexed due to malpractice.
164. Domain IP neighbors (if they have a bad reputation).

Links

165. Participation in link schemes.
166. Link to a bad neighborhood.
167. Traffic buying.
168. Link buying.
169. Being linked to by a site Google dislikes (you’ll be punished by association).

Behaviour

170. Automatically playing audio or video.
171. Unsecured payment gateways.
172. Percentage of SERP click-throughs which return to SERP page in a short time (sort of bounce rate).
173. Google staff find your site doesn’t match what’s in the Google cache.