Three ways to define ranking factors

[rabhasan018542]

SEOs on both sides of the debate. Some SEOs dismiss E-A-T. Others embrace it fully. Even Googlers have different opinions about how it should be communicated. I want to talk about this today not because it's a debate that only SEOs care about, but because it's important how we talk to stakeholders about E-A-T and SEO recommendations. Stakeholders being clients, website owners, webmasters. Anybody that we give an SEO recommendation to, how we talk about these things is important.


So I don't want to judge. I don't want to be the final say — that's not what I'm attempting — about whether Google E-A-T is an actual ranking factor. But I do want to explore the different viewpoints. I talked to dozens of SEOs, listened to lithuania business email list Googlers, read Google patents, and I found that a lot of the disagreement comes not from what Google E-A-T is — we have a pretty good understanding what Google E-A-T actually does — but how we define ranking factors.


I found that how we define ranking factors falls into roughly three different schools of thought. 1. Level 1: Directly measurably, directly impact rankings Now the first school of thought, this is the traditional view of ranking factors. People in this camp say that ranking factors are things that are directly measurable and they directly impact rankings, or they can directly impact rankings. These are signals that we're very familiar with, such as PageRank, URLs, canonicalization, things that we can see and measure and influence and directly impact Google's algorithm.