Reverse Engineering the Search Rankings (Webinar with SEOmoz’s Rand Fishkin)
Reverse Engineering the Search Rankings: Determining How the SERPs are Ordered and What You Need to To Do to Rise to the Top
Rand will cover:
- What is reverse engineering
- Search ranking factors
- Applying the process
- Examples in action
What is reverse engineering and why do it?
It is: a process to determine how a system is constructed. In this case, Google’s ranking algorithm for a particular query & result list.
Why do it:
Search Ranking Factors
There are over 200 ranking factors, some more important than others. This is the biennial survey SEOmoz conducts on ranking factors:
Trust & Authority of the Host Domain
Homepage Toolbar PageRank? – Rand cautions against this. Homepage PR is not about the domain, it’s on a URL basis.
(By the way, this URL will give you nice, clean search result screenshots.)
Domain mozRank – will give you the actual rank of the domain
Domain mozTrust – similar tool,
# of links to a domain – search on Yahoo for “linkdomain:yoursite.com”
Domain Authority – another SEOmoz algorithm (including Google’s ranking algorithm, page authority, domain authority, and many more). Puts all of these important stats together.
Links to a specific page
Toolbar PageRank – will give you a good idea of how many incoming links to a specific page
mozRank – if mozRank is high and PR is low, most of the time that’s because Linkscape updates far more often OR Google is not counting all the links to the page (might be a good indicator that that site is manipulating incoming links)
mozTrust – good anti-spam metric
# of links – relatively good metric, but you’ll want to break up internal/external links and nofollow/follow. Yahoo Site Explorer gives you raw number, but SEOmoz’s Open Site Explorer.
# of linking root domains – are there just a few with a ton of links from individual pages? Not good. Or a ton of links from a ton of different domains? Good.
Anchor Text
Exact Match Counts – you can see this under “Anchor Text Distribution” in Open Site Explorer
On-page/On-site Optimization
Important places for keywords:
- Exact Match Root Domain Name
- Keyword Matching in URL
- Title – in the front and together
Other important on-page element:
- H1
- Alt tag
- Body text
Don’t worry so much about keyword density. Instead, look at link metrics, etc.
Data isn’t perfect; Sometimes…we speculate.
Know what actions to pursue (and/or) What you need to Compete
Do you need:
- More anchor text rich links
- more domain diversity in your links
- More mozRank/PageRank
- More trusted link sources
- Better on-page optimization
- Freshness/Social & Sharing
- Something outside metrics (branding optimization)
Reverse engineering isn’t about trying to figure out why a site ranks where it does – it’s about figuring out what you need to do to do better (using your reverse engineering data).
Rand Fishkin, SEOmoz, @randfish
Tags: #mozinar, Rand Fishkin, SEOmoz