Maryland Internet Marketing Company Discusses New Google Ranking Factors

Google is always trying to refine its search results to give the best user experience it can to its millions of searchers.Every couple of years Google makes a shift in its algorithm and adds new key metrics to order organic search results.

Back in the 90’s Google relied on the keywords that could be found on each web page for ranking. Later, in 2005 Google began ranking pages using not only the keywords on the page, but the domain name and anchor text, and the diversity of the links.

In 2010 and 2011, Google has begun to make new changes to their ranking algorithm again. There are now more than 190 factors in Google’s algorithm, and it keeps increasing. These include:
links and text from social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube.
review/rating site links and text
Google Places listings and local links
images – Google now accepts XML-based sitemaps of image files
blog posts
news articles and press releases
videos
brand names
number of clicks the page gets
time spent on the page
bookmarks
keywords in the title and headings of the page
keywords in domain name, file names, bold, italics and underlined text
unique titles, descriptions and keywords on every page of the site
content that is well-written, informative and not duplicated

Google wants to give the best results for each type of query. So rather than show interesting sites for researching, Google’s instant search helps people refine their search query so that only sites selling retail products appear when someone is looking for a brand name product. Google wants to show the sites that are most likely to fulfill the searcher’s intent, and that means that Google’s algorithm is most likely going to become more personalized.

In addition, the following factors may begin to weigh into Google’s ranking in the near future, based on changes to the Google main page, and hints from their blogs.

Links from microformats like hReview and hCard
HTML5 and easy to read website code
Page speed – faster sites are favored
Entity Associations - Google’s recent acquisition of Metaweb gives it the ability to catalog different names for the same entity, so that search results can show other phrases that mean the same thing
Human search result quality raters (Bing uses them too) who analyze clicks to websites and other usage information.

As Google gathers more and more information in its extensive databases, it will be able to continually adapt its search algorithms to show more and more personalized and relevant search results. Maryland Internet marketing becomes more and more about quality content and using the Internet to network that content in as many places as possible.

By: Sue McCrossins

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Sue McCrossin is owner of Boomtown Internet Group, with offices in Maryland. As a Maryland SEO company, she is always interested in writing about changes in search engine algorithms, new properties, and advancements in Maryland Internet Marketing.