More than 1.1 billion people use Google search each month to make 114 billion searches. According to comScore, Google holds 67.6% of the U.S. search engine market share. This means that marketers looking to rank highly in organic search have to worry a great deal about what Google is looking for.
With all the talk about optimizing content for search engines, you’d think we’d know by now exactly what Google’s ranking algorithm considers when crawling pages on the internet. But we don’t, and we can’t — mainly because Google has never publicly listed all of the factors they take into account.
What Google has confirmed is that they use about 200 ranking signals when determining organic search page rankings. There are domain factors, page-level factors, site-level factors, backlink factors, user interaction, special algorithm rules, social signals, brand signals, on-site web spam factors, off-page web spam factors …
Whew! That’s quite a list. How are we supposed to remember all of those? Thanks to Single Grain and Backlinko, we don’t have to.
They’ve scoured the internet to find all of the mention of Google ranking factors and created an all-inclusive infographic listing and categorizing 200 factors that make up Google’s ranking algorithm. Check out their exhaustive guide below, and make sure to save it as a reference for your future SEO needs — just remember that the inclusion and importance of these factors could change over time.
