Ranking Factors
Posted on January 24th, 2010 in SEO | No Comments »
Here are some Google ranking factors which I have noticed in the last few months.
Length of domain registration
Most serp spammers will buy a domain for the minimum time which is 1 year, this is known as a throw away domain, it’s cheap and disposable. So by registering the domain for 2-4 years, this will show Google that the website has less chance of being used to spam the serps. Would you rather trust a domain purchased for 1 year or 10 years.
.info domains are seen as spam
What I’ve noticed with .info domains is that they don’t seem to rank even with authority backlinks until they have aged considerably . They seem to have a longer sandbox period than other domains because you can buy them cheaper than other domain extensions. Maybe registering .info for 3-4 years will be beneficial.
Some domains rank straight away
Some domains seem to rank straight away, while others just get sandboxed, even though the same level of competitive keywords are used and indexing methods.
Whois information does matter
Filling out all the correct Whois information seems to give your site more authority and legitimacy, does google cross reference this with an address checker? who knows. But I’m also certain that google has person blacklists, so if they penalized your past domains your data can be added to a blacklist which can cause future domains to be sandboxed when registering. Whether this is by name, address, postcode, email, Credit Card Detail or a combination of complex patterns, Maybe even the time you reg a domain places some part.
Going for generic
If your going for a generic keywords, it’s better to start of with long tail with the generic term included in the longtail, as diving straight into generic can raise some google penalties.
Content
Make sure you fill your site with lots of content before letting google visit the site, upload a blank index.php file or deny all ip’s with .htaccess. If your building a site and let google crawl through out the process it kinda messes up the ranking.
Size Matters
I think It’s better to have more pages than content, or a combination of both, the more keyword related interlinking is good for ranking with little backlinks.
Google is looking for quality sites that add value to search results, and it’s going to pick the best, and around 80% of the ranking factors are based on links, and content and relevance. It’s best to try and avoid penalties earlier on as it can cause problems.

