Posted by randfish
My post last week on the Google algorithm gave me the crazy idea to actually attempt to write out a rough outline of what the formula might look like. I've taken softplus' suggestion and given it a go using a massively simplistic weight/factor expression:
GoogScore = (KW Usage Score * 0.3) (Domain Strength * 0.25) (Inbound Link Score * 0.25) (User Data * 0.1) (Content Quality Score * 0.1) (Manual Boosts) - (Automated & Manual Penalties)
KW Usage Factors:
- KW in title tag
- KW in header tags
- KW in document text
- KW in internal links pointing to the page
- KW in domain and/or URL
Domain Strength
- Registration history
- Domain age
- Strength of links pointing to the domain
- Topical neighborhood of domain based on inlinks & outlinks
- Historical use & links pattern to domain
Inbound Link Score
- Age of links
- Quality of domains sending links
- Quality of pages sending links
- Anchor text of links
- Subject matter of linking pages/sites
User Data
- Historical CTR to page in SERPs
- Time users spend on page
- Search requests for URL/domain
- Historical visits/use of URL/domain by users GG can monitor (toolbar wifi analytics etc.)
Content Quality Score
- Potentially given by hand for popular queries/pages
- Provided by Google raters (remember Henk?)
- Machine-algos for rating text quality/readability/etc
Obviously this isn't a perfect summation of the algorithm by any means but I have a strong suspicion that if we were to see the exact algorithm in perfect form we'd see that a lot of these factors are strongly reflected in the weighting. There would most likely also be a lot of the factors from this list but for brevity's sake I figured I'd keep this post short and sweet.
What do you think? Any big oversights or complete goofs in the above formula?
p.s. Yes - I do think Google is using manual boosts particularly when the query is of a navigational nature and they'd like to place the source at #1 despite the fact that it might not be strong enough to rank there by itself.
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