What are the 200 variables in the Google Algorithm?

I chanced upon an interesting thread over at the Webmaster World forum. At the recent PubCon, Matt Cutts is supposed to have mentioned that there were over 200 variables in the Google Algorithm. This isn’t news actually. We know that are an embarrassing number of factors that determine the position a page on Google SERP (Search Engine Results Page). However, this time there is a list – a partial one, but no doubt, an insightful one.

Factors affecting SERP ranking

Domain
– Age of Domain
– History of domain
– KWs in domain name
– Sub domain or root domain
– TLD of Domain
– IP address of domain
– Location of IP address / Server

Architecture
– HTML structure
– Use of Headers tags
– URL path
– Use of external CSS / JS files

Content
– Keyword density of page
– Keyword in Title Tag
– Keyword in Meta Description (Not Meta Keywords)
– Keyword in KW in header tags (H1, H2 etc)
– Keyword in body text
– Freshness of Content

Per Inbound Link
– Quality of website linking in
– Quality of web page linking in
– Age of website
– Age of web page
– Relevancy of page’s content
– Location of link (Footer, Navigation, Body text)
– Anchor text if link
– Title attribute of link
– Alt tag of images linking
– Country specific TLD domain
– Authority TLD (.edu, .gov)
– Location of server
– Authority Link (CNN, BBC, etc)

Cluster of Links
– Uniqueness of Class C address.

Internal Cross Linking
– No of internal links to page
– Location of link on page
– Anchor text of FIRST text link (Bruce Clay’s point at PubCon)

Penalties
– Over Optimisation
– Purchasing Links
– Selling Links
– Comment Spamming
– Cloaking
– Hidden Text
– Duplicate Content
– Keyword stuffing
– Manual penalties
– Sandbox effect (Probably the same as age of domain)

Miscellaneous
– JavaScript Links
– No Follow Links

Pending
– Performance / Load of a website
– Speed of JS

Misconceptions
– XML Sitemap (Aids the crawler but doesn’t help rankings)
– PageRank (General Indicator of page’s performance)

Another interesting article from SEOmoz explaining Google’s Algorithm

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