Since 2007, when Google implemented the universal search rankingthe results displayed in the SERPs are becoming increasingly useful and richer, as they not only show results in the form of links, but also provide images, videos, news and even results in the form of reviews and Google Maps.
Google’s universal ranking algorithm scores over 200 different factors before positioning a web page in its ranking.
In this regard, there is a question that any user working with Google asks and that is, how do Google’s universal search ranking factors work? First of all, there are a large number of factors that affect ranking. Years ago, Google published a guide stating that there were more than 200 factorshowever, with the implementation of artificial intelligence and machine learning, these factors have changed significantly.
Google has pointed out that all the factors are included in seven major groups such as “Thematic”, “RankBrain”, “Page Speed”, etc. Each of these groups consists of many factors that Google calculates separately to provide a score for each of them. Finally, the scores of each of the groups are multiplied to obtain a final score, which is used to rank the content.
The number obtained is very high, something that has been done on purpose, as this way Google can add new factors without having to introduce changes to the way it calculates the ranking. At the same time, the fact that the final calculation is done by this multiplication means that any score lower than one will severely hurt the final score, no matter how high the other scores are.
This system rewards pages that have good scores across the board. Pages that score well on some factors, but poorly on others, will always struggle. In the end, a balanced approach always wins.
Google refines results before ranking web pages
The top ten results are sent to a second algorithm that is designed to refine the ranking and eliminate any unacceptable results that have slipped through the net. The factors taken into account here are different, as they are focused on very particular cases. In this case, the recalculation may increase or decrease by one position.
