Is it true that the Mountain View giant's algorithm is based on 200 factors to determine a website's ranking?
The myth that Google's algorithm is based on more than 200 ranking factors began to take shape in 2006, when Alan Eustace, then senior vice president of the company, mentioned in a press release that Google's algorithm uses more than 200 ranking factors to determine the ranking of websites.
As a curiosity, you should know that Alan Eustace, in addition to spreading that rumor in the SEO industry, is famous for having broken the record for jumping from the stratosphere in 2014, performing a freefall jump from 41.42 km altitude on October 24 of that year, thus breaking the world record that until then was held by the famous Felix Baumgartner.
Returning to our ranking factors, while that statement by Eustace conveyed the complexity of the algorithm to the general public, it also helped to solidify in the collective idea of many SEO experts the concept that Google has is “200 or more ranking factors”.
While this statement is not incorrect in one respect, this approximation is far from the actual number of elements that Google's algorithm actually takes into account today.
Four years later, in 2010, Matt Cutts (then head of Google's anti-spam department and a celebrated figure in the industry) debunked the myth of ranking factors, clarifying that the search engine is much more complex than that.
Cutts explained that each of the 200 factors has 50 variations, resulting in 10,000 signals that Google's algorithm checks to rank websites.
A few years later, in 2016, Google officially announced that the three most important ranking factors are content, links, and RankBrain, and although other factors can influence rankings, these three are considered among the most crucial.
Now, everyone knows the motto “content is king.” While it could be argued that, since Google is a semantic search engine, content is clearly the primary input for the algorithm to evaluate the quality of a page, it is perhaps a bit of an exaggeration to say that “content is king.”.
Simply because there is no single king among positioning factors.
One of the mantras of industry "experts" is the importance of constantly adding content to your website. Many SEO experts suggest, as a general rule, that new content should be added to a website at least once a week.
The truth is, there's no study to support this claim or how it helps SEO. Furthermore, if you think about it, it doesn't make any sense, since not all websites are the same and therefore can't all have a content strategy based on a common publishing frequency.
Furthermore, we all agree that quality is better than quality (it could be the SEO equivalent of the saying "buying cheap is buying twice").
The only strategy that has been tried and tested is that if, within the framework of a content strategy based on generating quality articles or landing pages (that is, those that are useful to the user and that fulfill the function of answering the search query), all aspects related to the content are addressed (structure, indexability, linking with other content through internal linking, etc.), then yes, content can be a key element in achieving organic traffic.
It's not simply about producing increasingly longer articles (another myth... that articles must have a minimum number of words) to get traffic, but about writing content that is SEO friendly for search engines (that is, that they can crawl and index it correctly... a concept that would deserve another article to be explained in detail) and for users (simply put, that answers their search).
From that official 2016 list (content, links and RankBrain) we are left with the links and RankBrain… and the eight years that have passed since then until today!
In short, a website's link profile is an external factor that provides Google with a lot of information about a domain's authority.
The goal should be to build a link profile that is "solid" and consistent, in relation to a number of metrics that would also deserve a separate article.
Link building (or link acquisition… or whatever name you want to give it) is a practice that is as common as it is poorly executed in the vast majority of cases (I can affirm this because of the incredible number of cases of spammed link profiles that I have encountered in the years I have been dedicated to SEO).
Most “SEO experts” don’t know how to build links correctly, so you have to be very careful when they propose a link building campaign (especially if this service is offered without being supported by other actions, such as content generation).
Although it is predicted (or rather, assumed, since Google has neither confirmed nor denied these rumors) that the weight of external links within Google's algorithm will decrease in the coming years, it is true that today it remains an extremely important element (especially in highly competitive environments).
Finally, to round out our discussion of these "magnificent three," there's RankBrain. But...What is RankBrain??
Google RankBrain is a machine learning (AI) algorithm, whose use was confirmed by Google in 2015, that helps to understand search queries and provide relevant results.
RankBrain analyzes how users interact with search results and learns from them to improve future searches. This represents a historic shift, moving from exclusively manual coding of Google's algorithm to automatically making specific adjustments based on countless factors that RankBrain considers depending on the search query.
RankBrain works by increasing or decreasing the importance of the (hundreds? thousands?) factors that make up its algorithm (links, domain authority, content analysis, etc.) and based on this it observes how Google users interact with the new search results.
Based on the results, RankBrain either keeps the applied changes or reverts to the previous algorithm. In short, it helps Google understand what users are truly interested in after performing a specific search, generating the best possible SERP.
For this reason, if you search for “comic strip character who always carried a blanket”"Google is now able to understand that we are looking for Linus, even if we don't mention his name.".
Since its implementation in 2015, when RankBrain was used for less than 15% of the queries performed, this algorithm based on machine learning and natural language analysis (natural language processing, NLP (or NLP in its English acronym) has become increasingly important, including new elements, such as EEAT (which in turn includes in the four pillars “Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness”, that is, “Experience, competence, authority and reliability”, a large number of sub-factors).
In short, we can say that while no one knows the exact number of ranking factors on which Google's algorithm is based (I suspect that even Google's own engineers couldn't give us a satisfactory answer today), there are some pillars (semantic SEO, technical SEO, and off-page SEO, particularly related to the link profile) that "command" and govern the core of Google's algorithm, and which, in turn, are made up of a myriad of other factors.
Updated 29/05/2024:
24 hours ago Rand Fishkin shared information leaked by an anonymous source, about what appear to be the ranking factors used by Google.
According to this information, there could be at least 14,000 ranking factors, some of which would contradict previous statements made by Google itself through its official channels or the personal accounts of its employees.
Full list of variables, here: https://dixonjones.com/google-ranking-signals/
More info in these two articles: https://sparktoro.com/blog/an-anonymous-source-shared-thousands-of-leaked-google-search-api-documents-with-me-everyone-in-seo-should-see-them/ y https://ipullrank.com/google-algo-leak.
