ranking factors - Internet Marketing News and Blogs

Rand Fishkin and the SEOmoz team have been busy working on this year's Search Engine Ranking Factors survey, which lists the most important factors which influence your site's SEO.

As with the previous survey, SEOmoz canvassed the opinions of 32 experts in the field of SEO to weigh up the relative importance of the various ranking factors.

It is a superb study that merits further investigation. After the jump we'll list some of the key ranking factors, but it is well worth a trip to SEOmoz.org for the full set of results... 

Bill Slawski at SEO by the Sea has an interesting post which gives an insight into how Google's Blog Search ranks its results. He has come across a patent application by Google which explains some of the ranking factors.

The patent application, 'Ranking Blog Documents', shows how Google ranks blogs according to searchers' queries based upon a combination of relevance and quality scores.

Webmaster World forums recently hosted a discussion on whether or not a site’s search engine ranking is affected by the length of time a domain name is registered for.

The theory is that registering a domain name for ten years indicates to Google that the domain’s owners’ have made a long term commitment and therefore the site is less likely to be spam.

Search Engine Journal has pointed out an excellent article by Bill Slawski on the complicated business of how search companies re-rank results.

It is important to get to grips with some of these factors if you are actively involved in SEO, since rankings can be influenced by any number of factors that may be outside of your control.