At PubCon, Matt Cutts mentioned that there were over 200 variables in the Google Algorithm.
I thought I’d start a list…
Domain
- Age of Domain
- History of domain
- KWs in domain name
- Sub domain or root domain?
- TLD of Domain
- IP address of domain
- Location of IP address / Server
Architecture
- HTML structure
- Use of Headers tags
- URL path
- Use of external CSS / JS files
Content
- Keyword density of page
- Keyword in Title Tag
- Keyword in Meta Description (Not Meta Keywords)
- Keyword in KW in header tags (H1, H2 etc)
- Keyword in body text
- Freshness of Content
Per Inbound Link
- Quality of website linking in
- Quality of web page linking in
- Age of website
- Age of web page
- Relevancy of page’s content
- Location of link (Footer, Navigation, Body text)
- Anchor text if link
- Title attribute of link
- Alt tag of images linking
- Country specific TLD domain
- Authority TLD (.edu, .gov)
- Location of server
- Authority Link (CNN, BBC, etc)
Cluster of Links
- Uniqueness of Class C address.
Internal Cross Linking
- No of internal links to page
- Location of link on page
- Anchor text of FIRST text link (Bruce Clay’s point at PubCon)
Penalties
- Over Optimisation
- Purchasing Links
- Selling Links
- Comment Spamming
- Cloaking
- Hidden Text
- Duplicate Content
- Keyword stuffing
- Manual penalties
- Sandbox effect (Probably the same as age of domain)
Miscellaneous
- JavaScript Links
- No Follow Links
Pending
- Performance / Load of a website
- Speed of JS
Misconceptions
- XML Sitemap (Aids the crawler but doesn’t help rankings)
- PageRank (General Indicator of page’s performance)