Google’s Algorithm
GoogScore = (KW Usage Score * 0.3) + (Domain Strength * 0.25) + (Inbound Link Score * 0.25) + (User Data * 0.1) + (Content Quality Score * 0.1) + (Manual Boosts) - (Automated & Manual Penalties)
KW Usage Factors:
- KW in title tag
- KW in header tags
- KW in document text
- KW in internal links pointing to the page
- KW in domain and/or URL
Domain Strength
- Registration history
- Domain age
- Strength of links pointing to the domain
- Topical neighborhood of domain based on inlinks & outlinks
- Historical use & links pattern to domain
Inbound Link Score
- Age of links
- Quality of domains sending links
- Quality of pages sending links
- Anchor text of links
- Link quantity/weight metric (Pagerank or a variation)
- Subject matter of linking pages/sites
User Data
- Historical CTR to page in SERPs
- Time users spend on page
- Search requests for URL/domain
- Historical visits/use of URL/domain by users GG can monitor (toolbar, wifi, analytics, etc.)
Content Quality Score
- Potentially given by hand for popular queries/pages
- Provided by Google raters (remember Henk?)
- Machine-algos for rating text quality/readability/etc
Obviously, this isn’t a perfect summation of the algorithm by any means, but I have a strong suspicion that if we were to see the exact algorithm in perfect form, we’d see that a lot of these factors are strongly reflected in the weighting. There would most likely also be a lot of the factors from :
Keyword Use in Title Tag
Keyword Use in Body Text
Relationship of Body Text Content to Keywords (Topic Analysis)
Keyword Use in H1 Tag
Keyword Use in Domain Name
Keyword Use in Page URL
Keyword Use in H2, H3, H4 Tags
Keyword Use in Alt Tags and Image Titles
and so on
What do you think? Any big oversights or complete goofs in the above formula?
p.s. Yes – I do think Google is using manual boosts, particularly when the query is of a navigational nature and they’d like to place the source at #1, despite the fact that it might not be strong enough to rank there by itself.
