New ways Search Engines are Ranking Pages

Do people choose your site from the Search Engine Results?

1. Do people click on your site when displayed in search results. For example suppose you work really hard on links and content and get your site in the top 10. However once you are there people seem reluctant to actually click on your result. This suggest to the search engine that your site doesn’t appear interesting therefore it may get moved down the rankings to reflect this. Similarly a site at number 10 may get a disproportionate large number of clicks for a site placed no. 10. Therefore the search engines move it up accordingly.

Is your Site a good experience for the user?

2. One can never underestimate the importance of page load times. A survey by the BBC suggests a page load of over 4 seconds may be enough to make viewers leave before they have even entered. [1]. If viewers don’t want to wait it is very likely search engines will also punish you. This does not mean you should necessarily be worried about temporary periods of downtime. But if your site is permanently slow this could be very detrimental to your long term rankings.

Is your site useful?

3. Often on getting good rankings there may be a temptation to take away useful external links and fill it with advertising. But if you empty the page of useful links and replace them with unrelated links, you shouldn’t be surprised if your rankings start to fall.

SEO tricks always fail

4. SEO tricks never work longterm. Some people still think they can fool search engines by using tricks. But look at the top sites for major keywords, are they using black hat tricks? However clever the trick is. Search engines are likely to find you out. This can also damage your “reputation” to engines as well.

Is your website real?

5. Do you have a contact. It is said that DMOZ check to see whether there is a prominent contact page with a real person behind the site. There is no reason why search engines can’t look for this as well. If you look at spammy sites you are unlikely to find a photo, real name and a real address behind the site. If you have nothing to hide why not put a contact, photo and address. To show there is a real person behind the site.

Do People Comeback?

6. Do people want to comeback? Search engines can examine how many people bookmark your site and revisit. If nobody bookmarks your site it suggests you have nothing to offer. Fresh content is important in the sense you need to offer people a genuine reason for coming back.

Is the Website Natural?

7. Are links self generated? Do they come just from a small network of sites on same IP address. Do you add content regularly or all at one go?

Are People Voting for You?

8. Do you get featured by other blogs? Do you get featured on sites like Digg, Shoutwire e.t.c?

Top Secret New Ranking Method for 2007

9. Pigeon Rank

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Bad advice that sounds good