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RESEARCH, ANALYSIS & TRENDS
Moz’s analysis of Google’s
ranking factors
Every two years, Moz surveys the opinions of dozens of Not quite as strong as the links at page level, how-
the world's brightest search marketers and runs correla- ever, the links to a domain and subdomain feature a
tion studies to better understand the workings of search relatively strong correlation.
engine algorithms.
The number of social shares that combine a site in
itself is still a controversial issue for Moz. By trend,
With the help of Moz's data scientist Dr. Matt Peters,
new data partners and over 150 search marketing pro- there is a positive correlation here, although Google
fessionals, more data points than ever could be ana- most likely does not use such signals directly in its
lyzed this time for the Search Engine Ranking Correla- algorithm, and therefore this only secondarily bene-
tion Study and Expert Survey. fits SEO.
Sites with lower bounce rates, higher page views
The study consists of two parts: a survey of professional and longer dwell times, are associated with a higher
SEOs, who provided expert opinions on over 90 ranking ranking.
factors, and an extensive study of correlations between
page features and ranking on Google. There is a proper correlation between domains that
include exactly the keyword and the ranking, which
Ultimately, Moz measured over 170 correlations and is according to Moz, however, due to other factors
collected over 15,000 data points from its panel of SEO than just a special preference for such domains by
experts to gain insight into the factors that may help or the algorithm.
hurt a website's visibility in search engines.
There is a low dependence between the type of top-
The key findings include: level domain (.com, .org, etc.) and the ranking on
Google.
The correlation between the appearance of keywords
on a page and how the ranking is getting weaker. While page length, hreflang use and the total num-
According to Moz, this could be because of Google ber of links are available only in a moderate connec-
no longer simply recognizing the keyword but other tion to the Google rankings, Moz determined a low
matching keywords, alternatives, and so on, as well positive correlation when using https. Hence, it
and becoming smarter. It is and remains central for could tip the scales between two sites. A clearly
websites to meet the needs of users. negative effect is a long server response time as
well as the total length of a URL.
Contrary to rumors, the number of links on a particu-
lar page still does not seem to be most important for
the ranking.
6 Asian eMarketing September 2015: Marketing Analytics & Search
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