Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Search engine optimization (SEO) experts say domain-level link authority features—such as the quality of links to a website and its overall PageRank—have the biggest positive impact on Google rankings, according to a recent report from Moz.

The report was based on data from an in-depth survey of 150 marketing professionals who specialize in search engine optimization. Each respondent rated the relative levels of influence exerted by broad search ranking factors on a scale of 1 (not influential) to 10 (highly influential).

Domain-level link authority features received an average score of 8.22, the highest of any factor. Page-level metrics ranked a close second (average score of 8.19), followed by page-level content/keywords (7.87). Detailed definitions of each factor can be found in the full report....