PENGUIN UPDATE: 5 NEW Factors that Google Uses to Rank Websites

PENGUIN UPDATE: 5 NEW Factors that Google Uses to Rank Websites | I manage an agency, so I do everything I can to get an edge up on the algorithm. Myself and a few other SEOers have analyzed tons of data to figure out the breakdown of penguin. We put a lot of time into this research, and I would love to hear your input! (For those of you that like stat, we correlated these factors using Spearman and plotted a Normal Distribution with an alpha level of .05 yielding 95% confidence)

5 New Post-Penguin Factors:

1. Anchor Text Diversity (Google Divides your number of links by the total number of different anchor texts used to link to your site)
2. The ratio of the number of links to deep pages vs your home page
3. The Composition of your backlinks TLDs
4. Average number of characters per word and H2 breaks (5.1 characters per word is ideal with one H2 per 150 words)
5. Time on Site (The time it takes a user to return back to Google, Dwell Time)

The New Factors - Broken Down

Factor 1: Anchor Text Variety
Google takes your total number of referring domains and divides it by the total number of different anchor texts that people use to link to your website. BUILDING LINKS TO BRANDED KEYWORDS IS NOT ENOUGH. The more links you have, the larger anchor text variety you should have. If you have 100 links, but those 100 website link to you using 5 different anchor texts... that is unnatural EVEN IF most of those links are branded keywords, like your site name.
Hint: Build anchor text for these type of keywords: "Visit the site", "click here" , "find out more information", "on their website", etc...

Factor 2: Ratio of Links to Deep Pages
Here is a sample breakdown of how the back link composition should look like on a website with 100 indexed pages and 120 links.

Page	Ideal # Of Links
Homepage	20 links
Popular Page	10 links
Pages 1-10	5 links each
Pages 10-20	2 links each
Pages 20-40	1 link each
Pages 40-100	No links

This is just an example and by no means actual data to rank well. What I am trying to illustrate is that don't build 1 link to every subpage. CHANGE IT UP. Build a ton of links to one subpage, then a decent amount of links to some more sub pages, but leave half of your pages without any links.

Factor 3: The Composition of the TLD's of your Backlinks
If 40% of your backlinks are from sites ending in .info, this is unnatural. On the other hand, if 100% of your backlinks are from sites ending in ".com", this is ALSO unnatural. In order to see top results, make sure your backlink profile is comprised of the following structure.

TLD	Ideal % Of Links
.com	60%
.net	10%
country specific	10%
.org	5%
.co, .info, .biz	5%
Other	10%

Factor 4: Average Character Length of Content
Spun articles tend to have either a significantly higher or significantly lower average character length than naturally written articles. In order to see top results, your average word should be 5.1 characters long.

Factor 5: Time on Site
Not everyone uses Google Analytics. That being said, Google doesn't need you to use analytics in order to get data about a users time on site. Dwell time measures both bounce rate and time-on-site metrics – I believe Google measures how long it takes for someone to return to a SERP after clicking on a result. This is data they can EASILY get from their own SERP data. They have already admitted to using this data in quality tests!

Summary:
There you have it. A brief overview of 5 new factors we have discovered since Penguin. This list is far from exhaustive, but these are ones I figured were worth mentioning. We spend hours and hours each day trying to break down the exact effects of every possible ranking factor. If their is a demand for users to see the actual math we used to determine this, PM me. I will send you our ACTUAL data and the true spearman correlation and Z-score data that was aggregated to come to these conclusions. THIS IS NOT SPECULATION but highly analyzed and correlated testing.

Take Home Points: Make sure your backlink profile looks natural, build alot of "garbage" anchor texts to increase diversity, keep your average word count at 5.1 characters, build links to deep pages (using the clever strategy above), and do something to make people stay on your site longer.

(Disclaimer: correlation is not causation. Just because these factors appear to effect rankings, doesn't mean they are actually in the Algorithm)

Source