Apologies for the long delay, but the search ranking factors article is now complete. Thanks to everyone who contributed; it’s quite an impressive display of how much knowledge and experience professional SEOs can share when they get together on a project.
There are now two formats, one where all of the comments left by the contributors are visible and another where they are hidden (to make it slightly easier to read). The formatting of the document could still use some work, so I’ll be experimenting to see if I can make a printable version for those who’d prefer to read it on a plane or at home in bed.
My favorite part of this project has to be the statistics that come from everyone’s voting contributions. Here’s just a few of the more interesting pieces of data:
- Only “Title Tags” had an average score equivalent to a 5/5.
- The average score in total was under 2.5 – suggesting that there are more unimportant factors than important ones.
- The average standard deviation was 1.02 exactly, showing that the 13 voters (myself included) had generally simliar ideas about the importance of the various factors.
- The standard deviation of all standard deviations in the study was only 0.23 – an indication that variance did not fluctuate much between items. We generally disagreed on each factor equally.
- There are 103 factors and Dan Thies left comments on 47 of them… Although, to be fair, one of his comments was “jibba jabba” 🙂
The comments themselves are remarkably insightful. I can’t thank my contributors enough. Reading through them, it feels like I’m getting the best of every forum discussion in snippet form – easy to digest, often humorous and generally thoughtful.
Note to Contributors: If there’s a comment you’d like to modify (typos, cut-offs, etc.), please let me know. The transcribing may not have been perfect.
