Rand Fishkin's breakdown of Google's Algorithm in 2009

At SMX recently, Rand Fishkin broke down a high level view of how Google currently ranks pages. I thought this was interesting enough to share.

• Trust authority of host domain - 25 percent
• Link population of specific page - 22 percent
• Anchor text of external links - 20 percent
• On page keyword use - 15 percent
• Traffic and CTR data - 7 percent
• Social graph metrics - 6 percent
• Hosting and registration - 5 percent

It sort of goes against the conventional thought of how SEO works to say that keyword usage only makes up 15% of the algorithm, but that number seems to make a lot of sense if you've ever tried to rank for a competitive term. Thoughts?

How Rand can be so sure? If he has said that, then he must have some strong points to back up all his claims. Could u clear the picture a little

I am not yet able to post links, so here is a broken one that you can fix and visit:

http://outspokenmedia dot com/internet-marketing-conferences/seo-ranking-factors-in-2009/

This is the context of Rand's comments.

Not really. Google is more about content, site trust, and backlinks. Keyword usage is about onpage optimization which, IMO, is not of the highest importance to Google. I think Rand is in the ballpark on his breakdown of assessing or rating a page.

Right- don't get me wrong here I tend to agree with Rand (he's probably forgotten more than I'll ever know about SEO).

I think what I'm getting at is that some of us who work for companies where the SEO knowledge is not universally at an expert level- there will be some education when it comes time to budget for certain parts of the process.

I think that he was talking about competitive pages on competitive sites.

If a site has ten pages and two links then the on-page optimization is going to weight heavily. But if the sites and pages are competitive then the deciding factor of the rankings will be the Trust of the domains and their links.

No amount of onpage tweaking will help a site/page that has only two links and some even half-assed competent competition.

Caveat: If the two links are from the home pages of Google and the White House I may change my story.

These comments are great for capturing interest... I would put this question out there...

To gain a 25% advantage how do you create trust authority in a host domain?

That "likely" is caused by the 22% link population that you didn't create... you gained naturally through having something other sites "just link to"... and there you have no real control of the next 20% because you're not partied to what people use as the anchor text...

That's 67% of the model that's based on the same philosophy... "just make great content and let the chips fall as they may..." "that's basically authority trust".

...and that 15% for onpage use... well I find that repeating a keyphrase in the title element doesn't do anything more than the first use... and the same is true for phrase in url... it stands to reason that having the phrase used more than once on the page adds no more ranking...

...in total 82%

...and these Traffic and CTR data, Social graph metrics, Hosting and registration...

Traffic and CTR data is great... but how do you use this stuff to strategically improve your ranks?

Social graph metric... great buzz phrase... but aren't these "just more links" and included in that original 22%

Hosting and Registration... I've move sites from shared hosting, sem-dedicated, and dedicated and some back and there isn't any appreciated difference... and registration (I assume this is domain renew stuff)... I've got domains registered for 10 years and they don't seem to have any added value over a 1 year term.

So while I agree the "WOW factor is there" but I think he says alot without saying anything really useful.

I generally agree with his over premise "TRUST" is a big factor and "TRUST" tends to be earned from links... the thing is "you can easily fake that"... 90% of the links that 90% of the SEOs and 99% of the do-it-yourselfers (admittedly a huge guess on the percentages) are advertising links... and these are "very poor trust generators"...

I'd love to see difficulty and cost indicators along with Rand percentages.

That "Trust Authority of Host Domain" - Extreme Difficulty (planning-wise and implementation) and cost $50K... BUT you get that 25% right out of the gate.

Google design papers state that they score and rank pages by the above and page rank.

All the rest is endless unproven conjecture. Most based on "SEOs" trying to make content to sell their services.

I have the screen shots of google serps for the most competive keywords in google history with a free host site that redirected to an affiliate link with 10,000 guestbook spam links.

Newbs ignore this prattle.

Do the basics of seo friendly . Then beat your keyword competitors in keywords links and pagerank. Your competitors will scour your code and backlinks, don't spam.

If you are business man looking for seo, get bids and ask for customers contact data for a testimonial.

This is all really crazy, especially since it's not clear as to whether we're talking about pagerank or search engine position...

I agree, Rand is selling his Randness... that's a great comment someone posted earlier.

His claims are all just guesses. I wonder if he knows the recipe to coca-cola too?

as a general measure, i think the first 4 are pretty important. i have no idea how he arrived at the actual %, sounds speculative to me.

i tend to rely on the factors that i found here recently at the link below. and i do think that rand talks a good game, his videos are pretty informative, to me anyway, i can only speak for myself and i'm no expert. in my travel niche, i can change my rankings on some keywords pretty clearly by changing the title and tags of some of my inner pages (not much in the way of backlinks to the inner pages, alas) so on page if pretty important. of course google also factors in the other things about the main domain for serps of inner pages too.

http://thekeywordacademy.com/search-engine-optimization/

Simple as - TLC... Titles, Links and Content... and content is about the creation of that which creates natural links.

Its interesting to note that many of the points are side effects from, either entirely or partially, from good content.

If you have good content people will link to it.

People linkint to your content gives your domain trust rank and authority.

If you have good content, people will visit it and stick around - giving good usability stats.

If you have good content you will get social media bennefits.

So if you master content and make a really nice user firendly site you will organically rank without very much effort.

This is in starch contrast to the SEO industry only a couple of years ago when a really ugly unfriendly site could have ranked.

This shows the maturity and evolution of the industry by giving users what they want - and isn't that the search engines point of being in the first place!

While all that you say is true... In many ways it has become easier for the talented with resources to mainupulate SERPs. It is just much harder for the amaturer. SEO has now matured. I agree. It now takes an experinced dedicated player to win. Good... Thats just the way I like it ...

But as with everything it opens doors to people who pretend to be the talented person with resources and rip off clients.