Search engines take into consideration a large number of factors when assigning a rank to a website. Although there are a number of factors that are obvious or specifically identified as ranking factors, the majority of the ranking criteria are kept private. Search engines avoid publicizing the exact pieces of the Search Engine Optimization puzzle that they use to determine a rank because it would most likely lead to a massive overflow of irrelevant search results.
Search Engines recognize that if all the sites on the Internet knew the characteristics that they use, then every site would be able to rank higher. Providing this information would make it too easy for website and go against their main goal which is to provide users with the most relevant and useful search results. Clearly expressing the measurements that are used to rank a website would prevent a relevant site from standing out amongst the other results and could potentially place a higher rank on a page that is worst or is less relevant to a user.
Search Engines use both on-the page as well as off-page elements to assign a rank. On-page factors usually focus on internal site structure including keyword use and internal linking where as an off-page aspect considers who you link to, how you link to them, and the popularity or relevance of your links. Some of the factors that are known or thought to be important to ranking well in search engines include:
- Keyword in the pages Title Tag.
- Appropriate and descriptive anchor text of Inbound Links.
- Global Link Popularity of Site.
- Age of domain.
- Link Popularity or equity within the internal link Structure.
- Relevance of an inbound link to the site and the text surrounding that link.
- Keyword use throughout the body copy.
- The popularity or authority of the website providing an inbound link.
With that being said, one of the major factors that search engines do directly distinguish as being harmful to a Websites rank is Duplicate Content. Duplicate Content is best described as a portion or… Read the rest
