Ranking factors in Google change all the time. Google is always creating and testing new factors, dropping older ranking factors, and adjusting weights on the factors they currently use. Guesses about how many potential ranking factors there are vary but the most common guess is 200 which stems from Matt Cutts in 2009. While we may never know the exact number of ranking factors that exist at any single time, there are many we know or strongly believe are impacting websites right now. This article will discuss ranking factors we know to exist, those that might exist, ones that definitely do not exist – and the relative impact of each factor.

Ranking factors have a few properties: They have to be something measurable and they must be something either public or that at least Google only can access. From here we can also speculate that most ranking factors have something to do with the internet, a user, or a website and rarely if ever anything that is too far removed. For example, Google unlikely both purchases your credit score data and uses it to help determine how reliable your website’s content is.

Unlike other ranking factor documents that use vague language, we will try and be more specific about ranking factors here when possible. It should be noted this is all the opinions of myself and the SEO team at Joe Youngblood SEO & Digital Marketing Consulting. We do not work for Google and have reached our conclusions based on hands on experience and research.

Quick List of the Top Google Ranking Factors in 2025 (General Search Results):

1. Page is Publicly Available to be Crawled and Indexed and is Indexed by Google
2. Target Keyword Included in the Title Tag
3. Target Keyword Included in the Content
4. Page Has a High PageRank Score
5. Content on the Page Satisfies the User’s Intent
6. Your Content is in Congruence With Broad Consensus
7. Anchor Text of Some Inbound Links Matches or is Semantically Relevant to Your Target Keyword
8. Site Quality Score
9. Number of Internal Links Pointing to a Page
10. Click Probability Score
11. No SEO Spam is Present on the Page
12. Page is Not Thin or Junk
13. Content is Considered to be of High Quality
14. Page Loads Quickly for Your Target Users
15. Page Provides a Good User Experience
16. Images Are Optimized for Handicapped Users With Alt Attributes
17. Topical Authority via Vector Embeddings
18. Page or Site or Company Match Local Intent and/or Current Location
19. Site Authority Score
20. Whole Site Meets User Intent
21. Content is as Fresh as User Expects it to Be
22. Content is Not Duplicated and/or is the Canonical for Duplicate Content
23. Page Provides a Good Page Experience
24. Page Qualifies For and is Granted a Featured Snippet
25. Your Website Has Good Technical SEO and is Easily Crawlable
26. Is a UGC Conversation or Recommendation on a Trusted UGC Website
27. Your Site Has a Positive Online Reputation and Reviews
28. Entity Salience, Connectedness, and Relevance
29. Target Keyword is in the Domain or You Have an Exact Match Domain
30. Has a High “Newsiness” Score for a Relevant Trending News Topic
31. Page is Prominent on the Website
32. How Difficult it Would Be for a Competitor to Duplicate Your Page
33. Your Site Outperforms All Others on Most Ranking Factors

Ranking Factors We Know Exist in 2025 (General Search Results):

Google’s ranking factors can largely be simplified as this; make great content that attracts links and attention from the web and ensure that the content is well-optimized on your site for usability, crawling, indexing, and ranking. We often boil this down even further to make it more simple for clients to understand. Google’s ranking factors fall into only 2 categories: What you say about yourself (your content), What others say about you (your content). Unfortunately, both of these are far too simplistic to be of much use to someone trying to optimize their website to rank higher. That is why we have created this list of Google’s current ranking factors, to help you focus on what is the most important in getting your site’s content to rank highly in Google’s search engine.

1. Page is Publicly Available to be Crawled and Indexed and is Indexed by Google – Google respects directives to remove pages from their index and in recent years has introduced a stricter system for indexing content or keeping content inside of its index. This makes being indexed the #1 ranking factor since you’ll never rank if this doesn’t happen. Based on this logic you might also assume creating a piece of content is the #1 ranking factor since it has to exist to rank, we’ll keep them both together here.

2. Target Keyword Included in the Title Tag – Google can rank a document without a keyword in the title tag, but this is less common and often times in the SERPs Google’s systems replace the title tag presented by the document or generate one if none exists. Internally we refer to the title tag as the “Target Tag” since it helps Google determine what you believe the target of the page is from there. The Target needs to match the content on the page AND not be overly SEO spammed.

3. Target Keyword Included in the Content – Google is more likely to rank a document where the keyword appears naturally in the content at least once or twice (it depends). However, there are many cases now where this is not always the case in today’s rankings and pages such as Homepages and Collection pages sometimes rank highly without any content or keywords. Still, we consider this a best practice and treat the other situations as one-offs.

4. Page Has a High PageRank Score – Google has used PageRank in some capacity to help their rankings since 1998, it is the algorithm that originally set them apart from the multitude of other search engines and still persists as a top ranking factor today. You cannot see this score as it is hidden and has been for over a decade, however, various online tools such as Ahrefs, SEMrush, Majestic, and Moz attempt to replicate it with scores of their own. Other documents might refer to this as “backlinks” or “link value” or “page authority” or “domain authority” while links might be used for other ranking factors, these terms are all roughly trying to explain the same ranking factor of PageRank. If you see someone say “Links” or “Backlinks” are a ranking factor, this is pretty much what they are talking about. Here are some ideas on ways you can gain links

5. Content on the Page Satisfies the User’s Intent – If Google believes your page or document is satisfying the intent of users, then you are more likely to rank higher for those keywords.

6. Your Content is in Congruence With Broad Consensus – In some cases Google is only ranking documents highly that appear to agree in some part with other similar documents across the web. For example if you claim the Earth is flat but more authoritative sources disagree, then your document is unlikely to rank on related queries. Specifically, Google evaluates content and tallies how many passages in your content agree, contradict, or do neither against the consensus of the web and then generates a “consensus score”. Our internal research shows this likely plays a large role in demotions attributed to the Helpful Content Update. It is our belief this has become a top ranking factor (or some might refer to it as a post-ranking or re-ranking factor) especially in YMYL categories but possibly also in various other categories including travel.

7. Anchor Text of Inbound Links Matches or is Semantically Relevant to Your Target Keyword – Anchor text on links pointing to your page is extremely helpful in rankings, however, since the Penguin update this appears to have narrowed and it is both much harder to gain such links without violating Google’s guidelines and it appears Google may not count all such links equally.

8. Site Quality Score – An internal Google score ostensibly unrelated to PageRank that seeks to rate the quality of content across an entire website. Site Quality could be a combination of various other things including accurate content, lack of conspiracy theories, etc… However, Google does have a patent for something called Site Quality which works differently and scores websites based on how often your brand name appears in related keyword searches, how frequently users skip over other organic listings to click your link, and how frequently your brand appears in anchor text on links pointing to your site. You would be excused for internally messaging this as “Content Quality” and “Brand Reputation” separately to help get executives and other stakeholders on board.

9. Number of Internal Links Pointing to a Page – Google considers the links, and possibly the anchor text as well, that internally link to pages as part of their ranking formula. Not all internal links may count, for example navigational links could for one reason or another be ignored, so websites should consider in-content, reference, and recommendation links as well. Examples include internally linking from a document to another with a relevant keyword or phrase, citing an internal page or document as a reference for another document, or recommending users visit one page after visiting another (i.e. related products and blog post).

10. Click Probability Score – Google both has data and has likely created internal models to predict how well a page might attract link clicks in their SERPs. The more likely a page is to attract clicks, the higher probability there is for it to rank well. This of course is probably based on real CTR data from Google when possible which is why writing compelling meta descriptions and title tags can have such a profound impact on rankings, especially over longer periods of time. It should be noted Google continues to refute claims they use CTR data so both could be true, they might well just be generating predictions. SEOs have a long history of testing and confirming this as well.

11. No SEO Spam is Present on the Page – We have witnessed first-hand looking at a specific portion of content and determining that this content might be considered SEO spam by Google, removing it, and seeing large jumps in rankings (i.e. middle of page 2 to #2 overall) within a 24-hour period. No Spam or Not Spam might very well be an increasingly important ranking factor for Google as they struggle to manage the massive volumes of GenAI created content that appears human generated to machine systems and which often follows older SEO advice.

12. Page is Not Thin or Junk – This factor outranks others because when discussing rankings we are not always talking about long-form content. If you have a service page make sure to add as much to the page as you can for users to read or see. If you have a contact page, you don’t need a ton of content on it. Google’s systems appear to be able to model and tell when pages are too thin or too thick with content or serve little to no purpose to a user’s quest for information or a place to transact.

13. Content is Considered to be of High Quality – This gets cited a lot because for the most part it is true. You have to have high quality content and it will rank well (considering other factors). Exactly how Google determines what is and is not a quality piece of content is an open question. However, you can do things to your content to make sure it might get considered as such including: Always include at least one relevant image when possible, fact check yourself and cite sources where applicable, write in good grammar for the language being used, structure your content well by using headings and good formatting, do not write your content to be overly verbose because you think that is what Google wants, write as much content as it takes to satisfy the question you are answering or topic you are discussing, discuss the topic in detail if and where needed, ensure the content is as comprehensive as the topic requires.

14. Page Loads Quickly for Your Target Users – If your site’s pages load in under 2 to 3 seconds on mobile devices in the market where you do business, you should be able to tick this box easily and move on. Getting pages to be even faster could be a win for your users and/or sales/conversions but it may not always translate into SEO success.

15. Page Provides a Good User Experience – If your pages flow well and users are able to navigate them easily and efficiently that should translate into higher rankings eventually. Pages with hard to use functionality, jumbled text, misaligned images, broken components, and other issues tend to rank much lower. Many modern CMSes seek to resolve most issues you might have out of the box and it is often added things like custom code, apps, or plugins that can hamper the user experience or long-term issues with underlying code or theme updates. We consider maintaining your codebase or CMS intrinsically linked to SEO even though it may not always be part of it. This is separate but similar from Google’s “Page Experience” signal which we consider to be less important.

16. Images Are Optimized for Handicapped Users With Alt Attributes – Google wants to provide the best experience they can to all users and that includes those who are vision impaired or blind. These users may use software called ‘screen readers’ which reads web content out to them and describes images. The software obtains the image information via alt attributes in the image’s HTML code. You can optimize this text and gain an SEO boost by helping out your users at the same time. You might see this often referred to as “image optimization”.

17. Topical Authority via Vector Embeddings – Google calculates how authoritative your site is on a specific topic and then how well content on your site adheres to that topic. If you’ve been told rankings largely come down to a website or domains “topical authority” that’s what this ranking factor is. We believe Google measures a sitewide signal that determines how authoritative a domain or subdomain might be on specific topics. If your site is found to be authoritative on the targeted topics or semantically related topics then you have a higher chance of ranking. Of course post HCU many pointed out how large publications were ranking number one on various keywords they had no topical authority on such as tire reviews on Forbes. Site Authority still plays an important role inside of Google, however, it may have diminished some in the recent past.

18. Page or Site or Company Match Local Intent and/or Current Location – If a keyword is localized or Google assumes there might be local intent in a keyword even without a geographic term being used, it is likely to show one more more local pages or even the map insert.

19. Site Authority Score – Similar but not to be confused with Topical Authority this is a score Google calculates based on your backlink profile, quality of your content, and how well your site has performed historically. The basic idea here is that Google is creating a score that gives weight to your site in rankings. The score itself may not be used and could be calculated by Google for other reasons such as benchmarking or scoring results. We have placed it here as a reminder that building a trusted and authoritative website that attracts backlinks and builds credibility can have a strong impact on rankings.

20. Whole Site Meets User Intent – As Google dives deeper into the AI Age of search one thing we have noted is extremely specific rules guarding page 1 on specific sets of queries. This is most likely intended to ensure users to website’s that can satisfy their real intent, even if the query itself is informational. Currently this factor appears to only impact fat head queries that are likely to be retail, pushing local retailers or lead gen retailers (typically made to order) out in favor of only displaying sites that have ecommerce capabilities.

21. Content is as Fresh as User Expects it to Be – A lot has been made out of content freshness over the years. Our take on it is that content should be fresh if a user reasonably expects it to be so (or of course if Google might expect it to be so). Examples include lists that are supposed to be evergreen like this one, you might rank higher if Google notices new information over time and possibly new dates in publishing data or meta data would help as well.

22. Content is Not Duplicated and/or is the Canonical for Duplicate Content – Google does not wish to waste its time trying to rank the same content over and over again. This often leads to the duplicate content filter, frequently mistaken as the duplicate content penalty, where Google selects on page that represents a group of duplicates and ranks it. This can have chilling effects on sites where duplicate content might be more normal such as social media, UGC, press releases, legal documents, and real estate listings. If your content might be duplicated elsewhere 100% (inside the body, this does not include header, nav, and footer) then you want to either sure it is the canonical, work to make your content more unique, OR find ways to get the other content deindexed or removed. The single most common issue is when designers build a new website that copies all of the old site’s content and is just a reskin, place it on a dev server, and Google indexes the dev server.

23. Page Provides a Good Page Experience – This is different though similar to #15. Page Experience is a specific ranking factor that is a collection of smaller components that each might have once been considered their own ranking factor. According to Google Page Experience specifically refers to: HTTPS usage, mobile friendliness, Core Web Vitals, lack of excessive ads, no interstitials, and main content is easily distinguished from other content. For most websites this is an easy one to tick off, for publishers it means being selective about their ads and user experience while maximizing revenue.

24. Page Qualifies For and is Granted a Featured Snippet – Snagging a Featured Snippet is a guaranteed #1 ranking, though these are more and more being replaced by AI Overviews. Google has various factors when selecting a Featured Snippet including a minimum PageRank, minimum Content Quality Score, the content concisely and directly answers a user’s query, there has to be enough text to generate a useful featured snippet, your website is relevant to the query, if you do not use the “nosnippet” or “data-nosnippet” tags, and if your “max snippet” setting isn’t too low.

25. Your Website Has Good Technical SEO and is Easily Crawlable – It’s long been known that good crawling = better rankings. Remove roadblocks to Google’s crawler that might make things harder on it (where reasonable and appropriate) and ensure there are not things on the whole site that would trip it up. Ensuring good usage of Robots.txt, Sitemap.xml, a good code base, and solid infrastructure for your hosting will help your site rank better while also being better for your users.

26. Is a UGC Conversation or Recommendation on a Trusted UGC Website – This is where Reddit, YouTube, Quora, etc… started generating their traffic. Google determined they were trusted websites and rank documents on these social media / UGC sites differently than other social media websites. Often times we’ve noted Reddit or Quora comments being the reason for a ranking even though the content feels thinner and less valuable than long-form blog posts on a subject. YouTube has enjoyed this special boost for a longtime solo, it appears Google is finding ways to give rankings to other social platforms as it seeks to offer more to users than Chatbot AI systems are capable of. This was momentarily a massive ranking factor but appears to have waned in the past year.

27. Your Site Has a Positive Online Reputation and Reviews – Google absolutely uses reviews in local rankings but they also appear to impact other rankings including shopping and software. There’s a chance this factor is actually bundled in with another factor such as Site Authority, but we have broken it out here to ensure you emphasize gaining reviews from customers with authentic experiences.

28. Entity Salience, Connectedness, and Relevance – Google uses advanced techniques to examine a page and determine if the entities on the page are prominent, relevant to the topic, and connected to each other.

29. Target Keyword is in Domain or Exact Match Domain – This absolutely appears to be correlated to higher rankings in most cases, but not all. EMDs or closely matching domains appear to have a leg up still, though their magic is currently waning down some and in most cases we review the site needs to have great content and links too. If you’re just getting started consider brands with weird names like Klarna and Google or names like Amazon and Apple where the brand has little to do with the business. Keywords in your domain could help you get started quickly though and in lower competition areas might propel you to the top of highly valuable segments.

30. Has a High “Newsiness” Score for a Relevant Trending News Topic – If you’re publishing news or you happen to publish content relevant to a recent news event (i.e. Newsjacking) you might get a temporary boost in rankings while Google’s systems determine the news item is trending. This is a visible factor you can see clearly during big events where the SERPs temporarily change to display the latest information, then slowly adjust over time to a more normal SERP.

31. Page is Prominent on the Website – Google simulates how much traffic a webpage might get on a site likely based on internal linking from important pages, and then determines how prominent that page is. Or, a better way of thinking about it is how important the page is to your site. The more buried a page might be, the less likely to is to rank. Google may not use this score in ranking calculations, but it highlights the importance of internal linking.

32. How Difficult it Would Be for a Competitor to Duplicate Your Page – Google keeps a tally of how much effort they believe you put into a specific page’s content and how hard it would be to duplicate and calculate this score with a specialized LLM. This of course likely adjusts over time with both things becoming easier to reproduce and others being able to create similar pages easily. You might be better of explaining this as “Uniqueness” of your page along with how hard it would be to reproduce. For example a unique photo of a gorgeous landscape might help you rank on the topic of that landscape, however, once more photographers take the same photo you might lose the uniqueness edge. We believe this also applies to elements on a webpage such as unique designs for displaying quotes or call out boxes, etc…

33. Your Site Outperforms All Others on Most of the Above Factors – This gets overlooked by a lot of SEOs and a lot of those pursuing SEO as a marketing channel. A major factor in your rankings is how well you stack up against the competition. That can be locally, regionally, nationally, and in some cases even internationally. This could honestly be the most important factor since so many companies get high rankings and then quit, allowing competitors to pass right by them in short order.

Ranking Factors We Believe MIGHT Exist in 2025 (General Search Results):

1. Website is Associated With a Popular Brand on Social Media – Exactly how Google is determining this, which platforms, and what engagement metrics is a big unknown. However, it seems relatively clear that not only is the data frequently publicly available and plausible it might help determine quality, but also that in some cases it is being used for rankings. For example, we do know Google is ranking Reddit and Quora content in the SERPs differently than a normal website, it stands to reason they might use metrics on those sites that help them determine quality. Reddit has a “Contributor Score” which Google likley has access to via their agreement and might be used to determine when to rank a Reddit post or comment.

2. TrustRank Score – An older Google (and Yahoo!) algorithm which takes a seed set of domains/URLs and then distributes an ever decreasing trust score from those pages throughout the web. The further away you are from the most trusted sites, the less Google might trust your document or entire site. Google nor Yahoo! ever revealed who the most trusted sites were but various SEO tools makers have taken guesses at this and generate scores which seek to reveal this such as TrustFlow and MozTrust. It appears likely to still be getting used in some capacity, possibly as a tie breaker signal and in far more limited scope such as a trusted website about. This is often where the misnomer that .EDU and .GOV links are the holy grail of link building comes from. While certainly you want to gain links from these places when possible, the best way is to prove your brand is trustworthy to the web.

3. Author’s Expertise – We know that Google tries to determine an author’s name and tracks their entity and we know they collect data on author’s as well, so it stands to reason that Google MIGHT take content written or created by someone associated with a website and try to understand when they are or are not discussing things in their wheelhouse so to speak. Articles where Google considers the author as authoritative might get a small boost in rankings. If Google is using something like this (also called the Author Graph or Authorship) it is unclear if they would do it cross-site or how they might be doing this.

4. Popularity Score – A score likely calculated using a collection of classic ranking signals like inbound links as well as things such as recent media mentions, social media mentions or engagements, and Google-only data like clicks on a Merchant Center product or driving directions on Google Maps to a location. We have caught Google experimenting with an ecommerce specific version of this theoretical score which they called “Popular Stores” and which overwrote the top 2 or 3 classic rankings in Google SERPs for fat head ecommerce queries.

5. User Has a Mobile App Associated With the Page Installed – If Google determines a user searching from a smartphone would prefer Target over Amazon because they have the Target app installed, the in some cases the SERPs for that user might reflect this even if Amazon deserves the ranking based on all other factors.

6. The Page Has a Required User Experience Element, Fact, or Other Information – We have noted in some SERPs the top ranking results are all quite homogenous in the types of content displayed. Going back years in the Archive we can see the evolution of these competing pages and watch as they all slowly realize the exact way Google wants the pages to be built, and theorize that in some cases Google might have extremely specific demands of what should appear on a page. For example if you are discussing a concert Google might determine the page needs to have show start times, ticket prices, an address to the venue, and perhaps a map image or embed.

7. Time on Site (or other similar metric) via Chrome – While bounce rate does not seem very useful for determining quality, in some cases measuring Time on Site or page depth might. We know Google’s Chrome collects data on all user activity with websites and it would then be easy for Google to find ways to incorporate this data into their search results in a way that helps surface quality content.

8. Some Content on a Page is Helpful to the User – This is what everyone thought the HCU updates were supposed to be about. A site-wide classifier that determined if your site produced helpful content or not. In reality that doesn’t appear to have been the case. However, outside of sites negatively impacted by the HCU series of updates we do note that helpful content appears to be at least somewhat correlated to improving rankings. This includes things like FAQs, introduction videos, input from editors/professionals on the topic, etc…

Ranking Factors That Do Not Exist, Have Been Retired, or Will Harm Your Site in 2025

1. Keyword Density
2. 100% Exact Match Anchor Text
3. Cloaking of Keywords
4. Keyword Stuffing in Content
5. Have the Most Linking Domains to your Page
6. .EDU links
7. Keyword Stuffing in Headings
8. Buying Google Ads
9. Having a YouTube Channel
10. Blog Comment Links

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