Google is “mildly” transparent about letting the world understand the ranking signals they use to prioritize content in their search engine results. But besides rough guidelines, it has always been a bit of an evolving guessing game to understand exactly what factors you should be prioritizing your time on. But Rand Fishkin and SEOmoz polled SEO experts and used data from more than 10,000 Google search results in order to try and figure out how Google ranks their ranking signals.
While their findings are exhaustive, here are the highlights and trends I found most fascinating.
Page-level linking is still more important than domain-level linking. For instance, if you’re looking to increase your search engine ranking for a specific page on your site, getting backlinks solely to your page isn’t your best move. But in general, the findings show that the power of links overall has declined.
In general, more content (longer documents) tend to rank better. But, short titles and URLs are still the best for URL, along with prioritizing keywords early within them.