Analysis of 11.8 Million Search Results – Common Factors for Page 1 on Google

Backlinko.com has analysed 11.8 million Google search results to find the answer to the question: What factors affect ranking on the search engine’s front page? The analysis looked at content, backlinks and even pages speed (Page speed)

Summary of Common Factors for Google page 1 Rankings:

• Domain authority measured by Ahrefs Domain Rating correlates with higher rankings.

• Pages with many backlinks rank higher than pages that do not have as many backlinks. In fact, Google’s top-ranked pages have an average of 3.8 times more backlinks than those that rank 2 to 10.

• Comprehensive content with a high “Content Grade” positioned itself higher than content that did not cover a topic in depth.

• The analysis found no link between a page’s speed to load (measured by Alexa) and Google’s first page rank.

• Having backlinks to several different pages seems to be important for SEO . Backlinko concluded that the number of domains linked to a page has a noticeable relationship when it comes to rankings.

• Most of Google’s title tags match the keyword exactly. But, no link could found between having the keyword in its title tag and higher ranking on the first page.

• Page Authority (measured by Ahrefs URL Rating) has a weak relationship with ranking.

• Backlinko discovered that the number of words was evenly distributed among the top 10 results. The Google home page average contained 1,447 words.

• HTML page size unrelated to rankings. In other words, a “heavy” page has the same chance of reaching high rank as a “light” page.

• There was a small correlation between the length of a URL and ranking. To be a little more specific – Short URLs tend to have a slight advantage in ranking, versus long URLs.

• The survey shows that the use of Schema markup has no connection with higher rankings.

• Web pages where the visitor spends more time than average tend to rank higher with Google. If a user spends 3 extra seconds on a page, this has to do with ranking higher in the search results.

Complete article including the procedure and all sources can be found here