Everything, and nothing, is a ranking factor
1st February, 2024
The SEO industry still loves to debate what is, or isn’t, a ranking factor for Google. It’s an appealing idea – if you can identify which key levers to pull, then you can focus your resources and outperform your competitors.
Sadly, it’s an outdated way of thinking about how Google works. Their systems are increasingly ‘black boxes’, which aim to emulate and evaluate user preference, rather than explicitly measuring individual metrics or pixels. Perhaps more problematically, discussing “ranking factors” tends to make us think about mechanics, instead of users.
That’s why I was delighted to see that Danny Sullivan recently posted that author bylines don’t help you rank better, but then went on to say, “[but] publications [with bylines] may exhibit the type of other characteristics our ranking systems find align with useful content”. To me, this does a great job of explaining how we should think about “ranking factors”; not in terms of whether specific features/activities move the needle, but in terms of whether those things are the kinds of things that a site that should rank well would do or have.
Author bylines don’t make you rank better. But having content which is demonstrably written by reputable authors is the kind of thing that a good, trustworthy, reputable site would do – the kind that users would want to see, and which Google would want to reward.
This is a different way of thinking about SEO, which allows you to consider types of (things which aren’t) “ranking factors” that your competitors are probably ignoring. For example…
If the font on your website is hard to read and frustrates people who use your site, is typography a ranking factor?
If your CEO is involved in a scandal that generates large amounts of media coverage but reduces your audience’s trust, is virtue (or vice) a ranking factor?
If your customer support team goes above and beyond to help a struggling customer, who goes on to recommend and tweet about your company, is empathy (or your training budget) a ranking factor?
If your office policy allows pets, and that reduces the bounce rate on your ‘About’ page (and generates a bunch of social media shares), are puppies a ranking factor?
For all of these, does it matter whether they directly affect rankings, or whether they just correlate with the kinds of outcomes that Google is looking to reward? I’d argue that it doesn’t matter. Doing anything that improves how users experience your website makes your website more like the kind of website that Google would want to surface – because it’s the kind of website that users would want to visit. Don’t overthink it.
