New study: which web page elements lead to high Google rankings?

The German company Sistrix analyzed the web page elements of top ranked pages in Google to find out which elements lead to high Google rankings. They analyzed 10,000 random keywords, and for every keyword, they analyzed the top 100 Google search results.

Which web page elements lead to high Google rankings?

Sistrix analyzed the influence of the following web page elements: web page title, web page body, headline tags, bold and strong tags, image file names, images alt text, domain name, path, parameters, file size, inbound links and PageRank.

• Keywords in the title tag seem to be important for high rankings on Google. It is also important that the targeted keywords are mentioned in the body tag, although the title tag seems to be more important.
• Keywords in H2-H6 headline tags seem to have an influence on the rankings while keywords in H1 headline tags don't seem to have an effect.
• Using keywords in bold or strong tags seems to have a slight effect on the top rankings. Web pages that used the keywords in image file names often had higher rankings. The same seems to be true for keywords in image alt attributes.
• Websites that use the targeted keyword in the domain name often had high rankings. It might be that these sites get many inbound links with the domain name as the link text.
• Keywords in the file path don't seem to have a positive effect on the Google rankings of the analyzed web sites. Web pages that use very few parameters in the URL (?id=123, etc.) or no parameters at all tend to get higher rankings than URLs that contain many parameters.
• The file size doesn't seem to influence the ranking of a web page on Google although smaller sites tend to have slightly higher rankings.
  It's no surprise that the number of inbound links and the PageRank had a large influence on the page rankings on Google. The top result on Google has usually about four times as many links as result number 11.

Why Google changes its algorithm

The article lists a concrete example why Google could change its algorithm:

"Recently, a search for 'French Revolution' returned too many sites about the recent French presidential election campaign — in which candidates opined on various policy revolutions — rather than the ouster of King Louis XVI.

A search-engine tweak gave more weight to pages with phrases like 'French Revolution' rather than pages that simply had both words."

If you want to get high rankings on Google, it's important to know whether you should use your keywords as a phrase or as separate words on your web pages. This can be different for different keywords.

Insider information about Google's ranking algorithm

The New York Times has recently published an article about Amit Singhal.

Amit Singhal is in charge of Google's ranking algorithm. The interview reveals some interesting facts about Google's ranking algorithm.

Google knows that its algorithm is not perfect

"Tweaking and quality control involve a balancing act. 'You make a change, and it affects some queries positively and others negatively,” [...] 'You can’t only launch things that are 100 percent positive.'"

"[...] Any of Google’s 10,000 employees can use its 'Buganizer' system to report a search problem, and about 100 times a day they do."

Google ranking tips from a Google employee

Google's Matt Cutts had a Q&A on the SearchMarketingExpo in Seattle. Here's a summary of the most important statements:

Google's supplemental index

Pages in Google's supplemental results are parsed differently than pages in the regular index. Pages from the supplemental results can get into the main index. According to Matt Cutts, phrase relationships are handled a bit differently for supplemental pages. He didn't reveal details.

Webmasters shouldn't be worried if they have pages in the supplemental index. Matt Cutts has hundreds of his own pages in the supplemental index.

Paid links

Google considers buying links to be outside of their guidelines and they might take strong actions against that in the future. Matt Cutts indicated that "Google might take action" if webmasters buy links anyway.

Outbound links

Matt Cutts said that links to other websites are good for users, and therefore good for search engines.

The impact of spammy domains that are owned by the same person

Matt Cutts indicated that a webmaster who owns many spammy websites might get trouble with his other websites.

Catalog pages and online store search result pages

Google tries to avoid online store result pages in its own result pages. If an online store search result page looks like search results that are available anywhere else, then Google doesn't like the page. It's much better if it has unique content.

Category pages in online shops work better according to Matt Cutts. However, a product should only be listed in the best-applicable category instead of being listed in 30 different locations.

Matt Cutts recommended to analyze the web pages that currently have high rankings because webmasters can learn from them.

SEO MYTH BUSTERS!!!!

Having tons of in-bound links will automatically rank your site very well? NO

Tons of in-bound links will only rank your site well if those links contain the keywords that you want to rank for.You might have thought that,if you get thousands back links for your site which contains skydiving from sites about mortgage then you will rank high in search engines.Having thousands of people with links that do not contain your keywords will help a little, but quality links that contain the keywords (or better yet, where the link text is the exact keywords) are much more valuable. That means you need lot less links to rank well.

The number of results returned for the “link:” command in a search engine is the number of links that the search engine actually counts toward the ranking of the page? NO

Most of the links are considered “duplicate” links by search engines. This usually happens when one domain has a link on every page of its site that points to the ranking page.That domain may have 500 pages, and so there might be 500 links pointing to the ranking page, so search engines omit those types of links . Search engines only actually counts a few of those links (or maybe even just one) toward the ranking of the page.
So what you may have thought was really serious competition turns out to be much more moderate. So you can now easily compete with pages which have many thousands backlinks beacuse you know that there are only few which count.