What determines your ranking in Google Search Result Pages (SERP)? A total of 37 experts in search engine optimization gather together and came up with a list of estimation on Google’s ranking algorithm. This includes the Top 10 Positive Factors, Most Controversial Factors and Top 5 Negative Factors. This may not be the exact way how Google rank each site but at it’s at least a join-agreement from some 37 experts from the industry. If getting ranked highly in Google SERP is always what you wanted to achieve, this is definitely a good guide to start with.

Top 10 Positive Factors

1. Keyword Use in Title Tag
2. Global Link Popularity of Site
3. Anchor Text of Inbound Link
4. Link Popularity within the Site’s Internal Link Structure
5. Age of Site
6. Topical Relevance of Inbound Links to Site
7. Link Popularity of Site in Topical Community
8. Keyword Use in Body Text
9. Global Link Popularity of Linking Site
10. Rate of New Inbound Links to Site

Most Controversial Factors

1. Manual Authority/Weight Given to Site by Google
2. Relevance of Site’s Primary Subject Matter to Query
3. Participation in Link Schemes or Actively Selling Links
4. Duplicate Title/Meta Tags on Many Pages
5. Global Link Popularity of Linking Site
6. Quality of the Document Content (as measured algorithmically)
7. Domain Extension of Linking Site (edu, gov, com, ca, co.uk, etc)
8. Server is Often Inaccessible to Bots
9. External Links to Low Quality/Spam Sites
10. TLD Extension of Site (edu, gov, us, ca, com, etc)

Top 5 Negetive Factors

1. Server is Often Inaccessible to Bots
2. Content Very Similar or Duplicate of Existing Content in the Index
3. External Links to Low Quality/Spam Sites
4. Duplicate Title/Meta Tags on Many Pages
5. Participation in Link Schemes or Actively Selling Links

via seomoz