PENGUIN UPDATE: 5 NEW Factors that Google Uses to Rank Websites

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  • SEO
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I manage an agency, so I do everything I can to get an edge up on the algorithm. Myself and a few other SEOers have analyzed tons of data to figure out the breakdown of penguin. We put a lot of time into this research, and I would love to hear your input! (For those of you that like stat, we correlated these factors using Spearman and plotted a Normal Distribution with an alpha level of .05 yielding 95% confidence)

5 New Post-Penguin Factors:
Anchor Text Diversity (Google Divides your number of links by the total number of different anchor texts used to link to your site)
The ratio of the number of links to deep pages vs your home page
The Composition of your backlinks TLDs
Average number of characters per word and H2 breaks (5.1 characters per word is ideal with one H2 per 150 words)
Time on Site (The time it takes a user to return back to Google, Dwell Time)




The New Factors - Broken Down

Factor 1: Anchor Text Variety
Google takes your total number of referring domains and divides it by the total number of different anchor texts that people use to link to your website. BUILDING LINKS TO BRANDED KEYWORDS IS NOT ENOUGH. The more links you have, the larger anchor text variety you should have. If you have 100 links, but those 100 website link to you using 5 different anchor texts... that is unnatural EVEN IF most of those links are branded keywords, like your site name.
Hint: Build anchor text for these type of keywords: "Visit the site", "click here" , "find out more information", "on their website", etc...

Factor 2: Ratio of Links to Deep Pages
Here is a sample breakdown of how the back link composition should look like on a website with 100 indexed pages and 120 links.
Page Ideal # Of Links
Homepage 20 links
Popular Page 10 links
Pages 1-10 5 links each
Pages 10-20 2 links each
Pages 20-40 1 link each
Pages 40-100 No links
This is just an example and by no means actual data to rank well. What I am trying to illustrate is that don't build 1 link to every subpage. CHANGE IT UP. Build a ton of links to one subpage, then a decent amount of links to some more sub pages, but leave half of your pages without any links.

Factor 3: The Composition of the TLD's of your Backlinks
If 40% of your backlinks are from sites ending in .info, this is unnatural. On the other hand, if 100% of your backlinks are from sites ending in ".com", this is ALSO unnatural. In order to see top results, make sure your backlink profile is comprised of the following structure.
TLD Ideal % Of Links
.com 60%
.net 10%
country specific 10%
.org 5%
.co, .info, .biz 5%
Other 10%

Factor 4: Average Character Length of Content
Spun articles tend to have either a significantly higher or significantly lower average character length than naturally written articles. In order to see top results, your average word should be 5.1 characters long.

Factor 5: Time on Site
Not everyone uses Google Analytics. That being said, Google doesn't need you to use analytics in order to get data about a users time on site. Dwell time measures both bounce rate and time-on-site metrics - I believe Google measures how long it takes for someone to return to a SERP after clicking on a result. This is data they can EASILY get from their own SERP data. They have already admitted to using this data in quality tests!

Summary:
There you have it. A brief overview of 5 new factors we have discovered since Penguin. This list is far from exhaustive, but these are ones I figured were worth mentioning. We spend hours and hours each day trying to break down the exact effects of every possible ranking factor. If their is a demand for users to see the actual math we used to determine this, PM me. I will send you our ACTUAL data and the true spearman correlation and Z-score data that was aggregated to come to these conclusions. THIS IS NOT SPECULATION but highly analyzed and correlated testing.

Take Home Points: Make sure your backlink profile looks natural, build alot of "garbage" anchor texts to increase diversity, keep your average word count at 5.1 characters, build links to deep pages (using the clever strategy above), and do something to make people stay on your site longer.

(Disclaimer: correlation is not causation. Just because these factors appear to effect rankings, doesn't mean they are actually in the Algorithm)
#factors #google #link building #penguin #penguin update #rank #ranking algorithm #seo #update #websites
  • Profile picture of the author MikeFriedman
    Somebody else already tried to steal this and post it as their own.

    http://www.warriorforum.com/adsense-...-websites.html
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  • Profile picture of the author TolyZ
    Oh God ... here we go again. Can you guys stop beating the dead horse? We have like 14372849732874829374 posts about this and all of them have the SAME THING:
    Anchor Diversity
    Link Diversity
    On-Page SEO

    I'm sorry, but if you didn't know this BEFORE the Penguin update then you can't call yourself an SEO expert.
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  • Profile picture of the author PartyNeon
    I believe I should cut this whole situation off at the head. I am the original author of this post, which I placed live online on June 20th, 2012 on BlackHatWorld. Unbeknownst to me, this article was copied and spread across multiple forums around the Web. I have been busy with my work, and up until today I decided to post this article again in separate forums.

    It's humorous to see the replies to the first person who copied and re-posted my work, seeing that he had no answers to any of the questions asked of him. That should have been an immediate red flag to the Warrior Forum community. I did not realize that other supposed "true" forum members had the audacity and poor taste to take this research and re-post it as their own. As any observant small child would recognize, I have maintained the same username across forums to maintain the validity of my work. Please excuse my lack of promptness on this issue, for I had no idea that this personal research would be redistributed across the Web without any credit given back to the original owner.
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  • Profile picture of the author TolyZ
    I <3 researches that talk about same thing OVER, and OVER and OVER again.
    1 Person creates a thread stating that link diversity important > Next thing we know there are 1323819829 people jumping on the band wagon creating threads "Google Penguin revealed" etc. AND they even create sh*tty WSO's about it.
    Can we stop now with this "wanna be seo experts"?
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  • Profile picture of the author orpaz191
    I'm not sute you're right about it. I see many sites ranked with low amounth of deep links.
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    The only way to succeed is to make others successful.

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  • Profile picture of the author myws6
    does backlink still works, some IM said backlink is dead, useless even related article backlinks, no one have a definite answer, all tested with individual finding, it like a blind man touching the elephant, all get right, but just part of it,
    who can give the whole answer?
    opinion is appreciated
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  • Profile picture of the author Kevin McNally
    Factor 3: The Composition of the TLD's of your Backlinks
    If 40% of your backlinks are from sites ending in .info, this is unnatural. On the other hand, if 100% of your backlinks are from sites ending in ".com", this is ALSO unnatural. In order to see top results, make sure your backlink profile is comprised of the following structure.
    TLD Ideal % Of Links
    .com 60%
    .net 10%
    country specific 10%
    .org 5%
    .co, .info, .biz 5%
    Other 10%
    Agree with most of the tips but do you have evidence to back up the percentage quoted for domain extension backlinks ratio ?
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  • Profile picture of the author MaryPabelate
    Banned
    These 5 points are really big points and we should centralize our work around them.
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  • Profile picture of the author ozetel
    It seems like the Penguin update was so long ago - what are the upcoming factors do you people think? Surely we are passed the Penguin requirements and in to new territory? If we stay too long back there, we will miss the more relevant current issues.
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  • Profile picture of the author Jacob Sterbenk
    Thank you for providing these information. I am, however, afraid of doing things in this business by percentage. What if Google discovers some day that all websites that have exactly the same percentage rate as stated above, are spammy websites. Then all our trouble would be wasted.
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  • Profile picture of the author LiftMyRank
    I agree with the OP, my data shows the same, G's algo is taking a shotgun approach to only ranking real authority sites, and it's definitely picking up some steam this year...
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    • Profile picture of the author Mike Anthony
      I'm calling total horse feathers on number 4. Number 3 probably has a role in extreme cases but I'll call horse feathers on that exact percentage as well. Everything else seems about right.

      Oh and this is going a bit overboard

      build alot of "garbage" anchor texts to increase diversity
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  • Profile picture of the author hadtic
    I wish there was only 5 points to SEO but infact there is hundreads. Site load time is infact part of Panda not Penguin.
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  • Profile picture of the author Becker13
    Banned
    I hear google is ranking sites by capitalization of anchor text too
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