Search Engine Ranking Factors 2011

Welcome to the 2011 edition of the Search Engine Ranking Factors. For the past 6 years, seocompanyinindias.blogspot.com has compiled the aggregated opinions of dozens of the world's best and brightest search marketers into this biennial, ranking factors document. This year, for the first time, we're presenting a second form of data - correlation-based analysis - alongside the opinions of our 132-person panel.

Over the pages of this document, you'll see segmentation of the search ranking algorithm into various components like "page-specific, link-level features," or "domain-level, keyword-agnostic features." These segments represent the different elements illustrated on the pie chart to the right. In each segment, you'll see three types of charts

The first, excerpted above, shows the opinions of SEOs on factors in a given segment, ranked in order from those the panel believes (on average) to be most important to least.















The second, also excerpted above, shows seocompanyinindias.blogspot.com analysis of 10,271 keyword search results from Google.com (US). The numbers shown are mean Spearman's correlation with higher rankings, meaning that a higher number indicates that websites + pages with the given feature (or more of the given feature, as in cases like "# of links") tended to rank higher on average than those without. Remember - correlation is not causation! Just because pages/sites with a given feature tend to rank higher doesn't necessarily mean that this particular feature is the cause of that higher ranking.