There are dozens of factors influencing the position of a page in SERPs. Every SEO beginner knows at least the three most important parameters: link popularity, quality of incoming links and keyword saturation. In addition to them search engines also consider the following aspects when ranking the search results.

Domain age

Google is known to assign more weight to domains with a longer history. There are numerous spam sites which appear daily in thousands and die quickly. To sort out these low quality websites from established ones Google uses the domain age as a ranking factor. Like in the real world customers tend to trust businesses that have been around for some time over brand new ones.

Domain age factor is built up from the time since the domain registration date and the term which the domain is registered for. So in order to get the most out of this factor it is advised to register your name for the longest period possible. Besides the domain age Google also considers the website age. Website age is a composite of how long the content has been in the Web, how long the website has been in promotion and the time since the last update.

The age criteria can be applied for other parameters as well: age of content, age of incoming links and so on. To find out more on domain age factor read The Age of a Domain Name article.

In my SEO-Tools section you can find a very useful Domain-Age tool by SEO-Chat.com

Dedicated IP address

I have read many discussions on whether dedicated IP address is beneficial over a shared IP. One of the evidence of these benefits is that many high ranking websites have a dedicated IP. It can be argued that high ranking websites usually belong to big established companies which can afford their own servers and unique IP addresses. So far there is no clear evidence of a relation between having a dedicated IP and high positions in search results. On the other hand those domains using a shared IP face a risk to find themselves in a ‘bad neighborhood’ of sites implementing spammy SEO techniques. This can result in a search engines penalty for the entire cluster of websites sharing the given IP. To sum up – having a unique IP may give you some algorithmic advantages (no clear evidence) and decrease the risk of a shared IP banned because of your neighbors’ dodgy actions. Getting a dedicated IP costs approximately $2-$6 a month (depending on hosting provider) and many webmasters consider it as a cheap ‘insurance’ to cover the risk of shared IPs. For more information on this topic see one of the discussion on WebmasterWorld Forum

Age of content

Like the domain age the age of content can be an important factor in search results ranking. One of its possible uses is sorting out duplicate content. Duplicate content is an old issue and in for past few years search engines have been constantly improving their plagiarism detection abilities. Using age of content allows solving the issue of copied text blocks appearing on pages which have authority higher than the original publication source. By comparing the publication dates it is possible to adjust the rankings and let the original page take the higher position in SERPs.

Content Updates

According to its patent specifications Google determines how ‘fresh’ or ‘stale’ a page is and then attempts to distinguish between normal and excessive updates. Google ranking system differentiates pages that require frequent content updates to remain valid and those pages that are expected to remain stale. The following factors are taken into account when determining the ‘freshness’ of a page:

• Frequency of content updates – how often the changes are made in the content
• Depth of changes made - negligible, moderate, substantial, or redundant
• Changes in keyword density and distribution (proximity)
• Changes in the number of inbound links pointing to a particular web page
• Changes in anchor texts (the actual text that is the link to a web page)
• Number of links to low trust web sites or sites of questionable nature (affiliate sites, sites with little or duplicate content, bad neighborhoods, etc)
• Changes in out going links to authority sites

The actual effect of each of these factors is kept secret, but some observations reveal rather suprising patterns in their appliance. For example a page with a stale content can still be considered fresh if there are changes in number, quality or anchor text of links pointing to the given page.
For a more detailed discussion of content updates effects go to Google Patent Specifications article.

Age of link and authority (or hub) weight of referring page

Again here age matters: old equals good. The referring page’s authority/hub weight is one of the major parameters in link analysis algorithms. See my previous articles on Link Analysis Algorithms.

Continued: Page-Related Factors and SERPs Ranking