The team recently presented fresh findings from its 2013 study at MozCon. As usual, this year's research has two parts – an expert survey (120 participants) and an analysis of search results (more than 14,000 queries). So far, the Moz team has published the results of the expert survey. The full study will be available closer to the end of summer.
The study aims to identify correlations between particular website characteristics and high Google rankings. These findings do not mean that the search engine necessarily uses these factors in its ranking algorithm.
According to the SEO experts surveyed, the following factors have the greatest influence on rankings, listed in descending order of importance:
- Domain-level link authority (external links pointing to the website)
- Page-level link authority (external links pointing to the page)
- Page-level keywords and content (using keywords in headings and meta tags)
- Page characteristics unrelated to keywords and external links (load speed, page length, use of video and images, and so on).
- Online brand mentions (of the main domain), including media coverage, Wikipedia and Facebook or Twitter accounts.
- Traffic and queries (CTR, bounce rate and so on)
- Page-level social signals (tweets, shares, social media comments and likes)
- Domain-level keywords (exact or partial matches between the domain name and a keyword)
- Domain characteristics unrelated to keywords and external links (unique content across the site, freshness, bounce rates for particular queries, pages with indexing errors and domain age)
Looking ahead, Western SEO specialists expect a shift away from traditional ranking factors, such as anchor text and exact-match keywords in domains, toward a deeper assessment of user value, authorship, structured data and social signals.