Could Use Help/Input with New Article on Ranking Factors

www.seomoz.org/articles/search-ranking-factors.php

I've put together this list to try to include as many influences on search results I could assemble. I'd seriously appreciate any help or input in this thread to improve/add to it. I know I've ubdoubtedly missed quite a few.

The list is not public yet, but I'm hoping to have it done early next week.

Thanks much!

Quality again Rand. I only scanned it. But you've covered many points.

Couple of quick points. You've mentioned how these items can impact rankings for major engines...but some of the engines treat certain of these items very differently. What might work in one engine doesn't work in others.

How about a matrix estimating relative importance of each issue for each engine. Certainly a bigger job...but more to the point for each engine.

I've learned the hard way that google treats stemming for plural entirely differently than do Y and MSN. Similarly, titles and URL extensions go a lot further in Y than the others.

Hope to take the time to look at it long and hard.

As usual, well written, provocative, and extremely helpful.

Dave

You make reference in 'URL, Technical, Hosting & Server Side Factors' to specific commands being in robots.txt - is it worth saying separately that the robots.txt should be present? Not all sites have one.

Should .org be added to '.gov, .mil or .edu ' as one of the more respected TLD extensions?

This is one I'm not sure about - if the domain name matches the query phrase directly, does this outrank a case where the domain name does not match the query, but the anchor text does?
E.g. is <a href="http://www.query-phrase.com/"></a> better than <a href="http://www.somesite.com/">query phrase</a> ?

i'm not sure if this is in any way important, but I've read that SE spiders look for a favicon.ico file. If they don't find it, they record an error code of some kind. Anything that is done to reduce such errors might be beneficial in a small way.

Wow! This is THE BEST SEO article that I have ever seen. No kidding. Enormous information, and fantastic presentation method.

Rand is THE Man!

I'll study and PM comments soon.

Amazing stuff again! I did come up with a few things that maybe I missed or weren't presented the way I expected. First, server uptime needs more importance than you give it. I used to own a hosting company and most of the customers we picked up were either web design clients or fleeing from their old hosts. Down-time starts as a "to be watched" flag for the SEs then goes to penalty and can even get banned. Also, slow server speeds will hurt a site's placement.

You mentioned related terms but not synonyms. I don't see these as the same. Maybe you do?

I saw inclusion in sitemap programs but missed seeing having an actual html site map. This helps your content get spidered quickly as well and puts the whole site structure in perspective for the SEs when done right.

I have term weight on my list but you must have had that somewhere.

KW selection is critical. Especially when facing the sandbox.

The number of outbound links is important, especially since G mentions you should have "a reasonable number" and that number is less than 100.

You didn't mention a lot of stuff that hurts rank, which is an influencing factor, like cloaking, doorway pages, etc.

You mentioned hyphens but not underscores. Underscores are often used by those who don't know better.

I saw several references to content and the quality and such but missed if it mentioned that you should stay on topic both on page and throughout the site. Cutts mentioned that on his blog. Going off-topic can hurt you especially if you happen to go off-topic for competitive terms which makes it advertising at best and spam at worst.

Did you mention stop words and keeping them limited?

Naming conventions for all files including images and even you CSS file. Make sure the names you use relate to your topic.

Finally, you mentioned geography of the server but I didn't see anything about the language used.

Anyway, its an awsome post. I've been sick for days and its late so I'm sure you covered a lot of this.

This is an excellent point. A complete treatment of this topic would include the negatives as well as the positives. Could be done as a separate article or blended into this one by giving red bullets to the bad stuff and green bullets to the good stuff. e.g. title tag gets five green bullets and hidden text gets five red ones.

These are great ideas, gang and much appreciated. I'm going to be adding a lot of these today.

Aw, geez randfish, I'm your biggest fan! I read all your posts here and then do a bit of investigation beyond. You add a sense of intelligence and legitimacy here and I appreciate it.

Besides, you have the same first name as me so you have to be cool!

I have no idea what you are talking about

I guess he's thrilled there's another "Rand" out there somewhere. You could even be his long lost twin!!! (oh... wait a minute... twins don't usually share a first name, do they?)

Great article Randfish as always.

It's just one thing after reading the article quickly I don't totally agree with:
I know several people have stated that this may have a bad influence on ranking, but based on my personal experience I can't agree with this. And I also think it's strange if this is weighted if you look at Blogger, why would Google make a solution that create url's which may indicate spamming or lower quality?

Again, this is just my humble opinion based on my experience and not testing, so I may be wrong, but for the moment I don't fully buy this theory.

Other than that, your intelligent contribution here is highly appreciated.

Mano - You could be right, but I believe it's worth listing as a "potential" ranking factor. None of these are presumed to be fact, simply possibilities. I certainly see this as something SEs "could" consider, and will probably keep it in. Thanks for the input, though.

In news on this. It's done today and I'll have it up in a matter of minutes on the site!

On page factors:

• W3 Validation is not a ranking factor, validation is only about putting opening and closing tags together and correct nesting.
• "Use of H1, Bold and other visual tags" > Strip the Hx part and put this is the "Paragraph headings" part because that's where the Hx tags are for.
• H1 could use a seperate chapter, it has the power to replace the title tag when title is left empty.
• Keyword use in TLD isn't mentioned.
• Anchor text for internal linking is also an onpage factor
• Google/Yahoo sitemaps?
• Overall use of semantics

Site factors:

• # of hosted documents deserves at least a dot more, Google loves large sites

Linking factors:

• Pagerank of inbound linkpage (??)
• Title of inbound linkpage (all theme related factors I guess)
• I have my doubt on "Semantic Relationship of Linking Page"
• Consistency of inbounds link anchor text

For the technical part:

• Flash, javascript, java, img-navigation and so on.
• Clustered IP linking (12.34.56.78 <> 12.34.56.79)

Not much else for now... Enjoy

Edit
One more thing, you've listed a few things that are Google-patented. It may be wise to mention this.