Google Rank Factors vs Google Rank Signals

You might have heard that Google uses over ‘200 signals” to help it rank documents, and see references to rank signals AND rank factors. A common misconception is that rank signals are synonymous (mean the same thing) as rank factors and these are often conflated (confused as one) in SEO discussions. Rank Signals help Google know what the document is discussing – but they don’t “convince” or empower Google to rank the document. That is purely a Rank Factor.

Learn More about SEO and Google

A part of a series  “How does Google work“. and “How does SEO Work“.

What are Rank Signals in SEO?

Rank signals are things that Google might look for to promote an article within the top x to the top position – normally featured.

How can we know this – like many SEOs in my position – I typically track 250 keywords per account using tools like semrush. using SEMrush’s global database I can see domains that have 250-350 position 0s – so I know exactly what we did to try to secure these and how many pages we build and how successful we are.

Semrush can aggregate this and I have over 50 domains in my agency accounts – gets me a lot of data. I am not responsible for all of this data – some of the project I’ve worked on, I’ve personally had $125k a month for global PR budgets and influencer outreach (which I picked based on assessing their traffic in semrush looking for blog posts for their audiences in cloud based tech products for example)

Examples of Rank Signals

Back to Rank signals, Rank signals are:

  • PageSpeed – maybe a 0.1% strength, maybe less
  • Meta-description words
  • Page title: probably 20%
  • Slug: probably 25%
  • Content words: maybe 5% impact (I posted a blog post that is one of my top earners and it has 0 words)
  • images – maybe 0.1%
  • Schema: 5%
  • Document Names: 70% – you can see this in YouTube and GSC – the document names are the number one rank signal. In fact -t his is all you need. A URL contains the domain AND the document name – and thats enough – e.g. PDFs, .Bas files

Its critical to note that these dont always have ANY impact. Like Images almost have 0 impact – yet putting in “unique” images is in every “SEO list” of things for “on-page SEO” – I guarantee you a page can rank without an image- but I can find you 15% of this community who will tell you its a fact.. Another key thing about singals is that they have 0% weight as rank factors.

Rank signals are 99% Relevance ONLY

Google supports 56 non-HTML file types – that means documents without html, without schema, meta-titles etc

Rank Factors

There’s a lot in here but I am looking fowrad to questions, rebuttals, rebukes, challenges, ideas, etc

There are a million factors at stake, 

There aren’t. If I may, this is a conflation of two things. One is – google say there are 200 rank signals and speak of raqnk factors and rank signals and people have made a fundamentally flawed mistake of assuming these two similar sounding synonyms are similar – they are absolutely not. They are not int he same category.

To simplify it – all rank signals are not and never rank factors. There are 3 rank factors and they are immutable. Even within rank signals they are not equal.

Here’s my SEO equation

Rank = authority + Relevance

Rank Factors

Rank factors grossly outweigh rank signals. These are backlinks and organic traffic/clicks. Go to the SEO starter Guide and look at PageRank. PageRank is FUNDAMENTAL (i.e. essential to, cannot exist without) to SEO. There is nothing else listed as Fundamental. 

Example Myths and fake SEO Rank Signals

One of the many myths about SEO is that we dont know how it works. This is a logical fallacy known as a “Thought limiting Cliche” and we do actually know how Google works. For one, Google publishes content, webinars, video chats, has a public forum and publishes its patents (as required as part of the patent process/law).

Here are mythical rank signals that we regularly debunk in our SEO myth posts.

  1. Social Signals
    1. Google can read and understand links in social media but they do not count as links
    2. Google specifically says it doesn’t treat social media any differently
    3. Almost all social posts are nofollow
    4. More than 50% of posts aren’t crawled and 90% don’t have organic traffic (therefore no authority)
    5. A tiny number might and this may have some small impact
    6. But there are no social “signals” specifically
    7. Google specifically ignore Social Profile links
  2. Other traffic from other sources
  3. Age helps ranking
  4. Posts need “unique” (or any) images
  5. Sitemaps “help” SEO

 

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