SEOs Choose Their Own Preferred Rankings Factors, With One Clear Winner
19, Oct 2021
Craig UptonIn a perfect world, SEOs and webmasters would be able to choose their own ranking factors. Rather than putting your livelihood in the hands of the powers that be at Google, you would have some say in the metrics used to gauge website quality and determine SERP rankings.
Which specific ranking factor would you choose? If you could make any given ranking factor a bigger deal at Google, which would it be?
This was the question put to SEOs on Twitter by Remco Tensen, curious as to which ranking factors SEOs would actually like to see Google focus on. Four options were provided in the poll – Links, Usability, Factuality, and Freshness – of which the winner came as no major surprise.
If SEOs were given the power to choose important ranking factors, most would choose factuality which is the option having taken 33.3% of votes cast. Second in line came usability, with an impressive 27.1 proportion of votes cast. Links followed closely with 26.5%, while just 13.1% the votes cast went the way of freshness.
All of which would seem to indicate that SEOs place more emphasis on the accuracy and user-friendliness of a website than ensuring it is regularly refreshed with new content/information.
Though of course, each of these play a pivotal role in determining a website’s SERP placement.
Or at least they did, until whatever is happening behind the scenes right now at Google made its mark on the SEO landscape. For reasons we still do not know, something big is currently taking place with Google’s main search algorithm resulting in more than 80% of SEOs reporting significant declines in their rankings and traffic.
