“Is it a ranking factor? Is there any more widely contested topic in the entire industry of SEO?”, says the introduction to a new free download called Google Ranking Factors – Fact or Fiction from Search Engine Journal.
The publication is 600 pages long (!) but it’s very readable, and I’d recommend downloading it to anyone who’s even vaguely involved in managing their website.
The authors have researched and compiled findings on 88 signals that have been declared, at one time or another, to be Google ranking factors. Whether it’s page speed, content length, deep linking or grammar, the signals get a verdict of Confirmed, Probably, Possibly, Unlikely, Not Anymore or Definitely Not.
According to Google, ranking signals cannot be sorted in order of importance, but some are clearly more equal than others.