Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

With all the talk about optimizing content for search engines, you'd think we'd know by now exactly what Google's ranking algorithm considers when crawling pages on the internet. But we don't, and we can't -- mainly because Google has never publicly listed all of the factors they take into account.

What Google has confirmed is that they use about 200 ranking signals when determining organic search page rankings. There are domain factors, page-level factors, site-level factors, backlink factors, user interaction, special algorithm rules, social signals, brand signals, on-site web spam factors, off-page web spam factors ... 

Whew! That's quite a list. How are we supposed to remember all of those? Thanks to Single Grain and Backlinko, we don't have to....