Discovering, crawling, and indexing content only make up the first part of the puzzle. Search engines also need a way to rank matching results when a user performs a search. This is the job of search algorithms.
What are search algorithms?
Search algorithms are formulas that match and rank relevant results from the index. Google uses many factors in its algorithms.
Key Google ranking factors
Nobody knows every Google ranking factor because Google hasn’t disclosed them. But we do know some key ones. Let’s look at a few of them.
Backlinks
Backlinks are links from a page on one website to another. They’re one of Google’s strongest ranking factors.This is probably why we saw a strong correlation between linking domains and organic traffic in our study of over a billion pages.
It’s not all about quantity, though. Quality matters too. Pages with a few high-quality backlinks often outrank those with many low-quality backlinks.
Did you know?
You can check backlinks to your website for free in Ahrefs.
Sign up for a free Ahrefs Webmaster Tools account, enter your domain in Site Explorer, and go to the Backlinks report.
Our crawler is the fifth most active on the web,so you’ll see a pretty complete view of your backlinks here.
Relevance
Relevance is the usefulness of a given result for the searcher. Google has many ways of determining this. At the most basic level, it looks for pages containing the same keywords as the search query. It also looks at interaction data to see if others found the result useful.
Freshness
Freshness is a query-dependent ranking factor. It’s stronger for searches that call for fresh results. That’s why you see a recently published top result for “new netflix series” but not “how to solve a rubik’s cube.”
Page speed
Page speed is a ranking factor on desktop and mobile. But it’s more of a negative ranking factor than a positive one. This is because it negatively affects the slowest pages rather than positively affect lightning-fast pages.
Did you know?
You can check your page speed for free in Ahrefs.
Sign up for a free Ahrefs Webmaster Tools account, crawl your website with Ahrefs’ Site Audit, then go to the Performance report. In general, the less red you see, the better.
Mobile-friendliness
Mobile-friendliness has been a ranking factor on mobile and desktop since Google’s switch to mobile-first indexing in 2019.
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