Document Level
Ranking factors responsible for assessing relevance usually operate at the document level.
Something is considered relevant for search engines if a document or content is significant in relation to the search query and its search intent.
Here are some of the ranking factors applied at the document level:
- Keyword usage in headlines, content, and page titles
- TF-IDF
- Internal and external linking and anchor texts
- Content Scope
- User Signals (Deeprank, RankEmbed BERT, Navboost)
- Rankbrain
- Freshness
- Meeting the search intent
- Timeliness
- Neural Matching
- Passage Based Indexing
- Knowledge Based Trust (E-E-A-T)
- Helpful Content (E-E-A-T)
- Information Gain
Domain-Level
Domains are digital representations of originator entities.
However, entity-independent ranking factors also apply at the domain level.
Therefore, this dimension should be viewed in segments.
Sitewide or domain-related ranking factors can affect the overall domain level, website area level, or topic level and are not relevance but quality factors.
Here are some domain-level ranking factors:
- Top Level Domains (TLDs)
- Internal and external linking and anchor texts
- Content quality overall or per topic (E-E-A-T)
- Page Experience (Core Web Vitals)
- Domain Age
- Domain-Trust
- Coati (Panda) (E-E-A-T)
- Distance to Trust Seed Sites in Linkgraph (E-E-A-T)
- Transparency about authors and publishers (E-E-A-T)
- Topical Authority (E-E-A-T)
Source Entity Level
The evaluation of originator entities (authors, organizations) according to E-E-A-T is a relatively new dimension in Google ranking.
It is also a thematic or general quality rating that can be used independently of a domain.
The basis was created in 2013 by the Hummingbird Update and the Knowledge Graph.
Ranking factors for evaluating the originator entity include:
- Author’s experience
- Co-occurrences of the entity name with thematically relevant terms in search queries and content
- Sentiment about the entity
- Number of published content on a topic
- Percentage of content within a thematic document corpus
- Mention of the entity in best of and award lists
- Brand Search Demand
