What is a ranking factor?

A ranking factor plays an important role in the position that a website is able to achieve within the search results. These are all factors that play a role in Google's algorithm. How exactly this algorithm looks like is not entirely clear to anyone. This is never revealed. Online marketers do have a good idea of what the algorithm looks like. Google also releases some information from time to time, but there are very few people in the world who can tell exactly what the algorithm looks like. 

Fortunately. After all, this algorithm helps to ensure the quality of the websites. If the algorithm were known to everyone, this would also mean that people would adjust their websites to it. This could mean that less qualitative websites would end up higher in the search results, which would also damage Google's good name. 

It is not exactly known what the ranking factors are within Google. After all, they are never officially confirmed. But don't worry, because most people have a good idea and some ranking factors can be confirmed with a bit of research. But what is a ranking factor and which factors have actually been confirmed? 

Definition of a ranking factor 

A ranking factor is what Google bases the quality of a web page on. This can be many different factors. Anything that can influence the quality of the page. Think for example of the use of rich content, images, hyperlinks, SEO strategies, and so on. These factors help Google's algorithm to understand, read and rank websites. The most relevant pages rank high in Google's SERPs. 

Which ranking factor is confirmed? 

We do not know exactly which ranking factors are used by Google. This will never be told officially. However, we do have a good idea of the effect of certain factors. This is mainly due to many different tests. To understand the exact effect, it is sometimes important to just try something out and then read the results by doing a web analysis. When there have been few changes and you do see a clear difference in visitor numbers and conversions, this could be a sign that you have achieved a higher ranking in the search engines. 

In theory, ranking factors should not be necessary. Google is simply looking for websites with relevant, attractive and unique information. If you can create a beautiful website with relevant and unique content, this should be enough for a good position in the search results. In practice, however, it is not that easy. After all, Google itself cannot evaluate all websites in the online world. That is simply impossible. Therefore, there are so-called web crawlers that evaluate the websites. These so-called ranking factors are then taken into account when determining the position within the search results.