Google’s 200 Ranking Factors, YouTube Tools, Bluehost Massive Outage, Speedlink 31:2013

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Hi everyone! Hope you all had a great and productive week. While undoubtedly one of the biggest buzz that occurred this week was that of BlueHost and other hosting companies going down, I’ll start off with a post published on Entrepreneur.com about the complete list of Google’s 200 search ranking factors. As you may imagine, this list in the form of an infographic, is obviously not an official one, but rather a comprehensive and massive compilation of information made by digital marketing firms Backlinko and Single Grain.

Google 200 Search Ranking Factors

These 200 factors that Google supposedly considers when ranking sites in its search results, where collected from high authority SEO blogs and from statements made by Google’s head of web spam, Matt Cutts. Some key highlights of the list, as mentioned in the post, include:

  • Target keywords. It’s important to have your target keywords in your site’s title tags. Google relies on this tag to determine the topic of your page. Industry studies have shown that pages with their target keyword in the title tag tend to perform better than pages without.

  • Backlinks. Focus on building quality links pointing to your site. Although link quality is important, the total number of links pointing to your site is an important ranking signal.

  • Social signals. Get people to share your content on social media sites. Google is paying more attention to social signals, including retweets, Facebook shares and Google +s.

Related: The Three Pillars of A Good SEO Foundation

The infographic is really long, so I suggest you head over there and bookmark it for future consultation.

YouTube Announces More Tools For Creators

YouTube this week announced the release of more tools to build your channels. Provided you account is in good standing, you should now be able to use a bunch of features such as: live streaming (requires your channel to have only 100 subscribers, down from 1000), custom thumbnails, external annotations and series playlists.

One of the most interesting additions perhaps is that of external annotations. Here’s what they say…

Drive traffic to your merch: Want viewers to buy that new t-shirt you’re wearing in your video? You can now use annotations to link externally to various online stores and your associated websites.

Endurance Group’s BlueHost and Others Goes Down

Finally, the buzz of the week. Bluehost, HostGator, JustHost and HostMonster yesterday suffered from a massive outage that I still would like to know what really happened. The official statement sent out by the Endurance Group (owner of all these hosting companies), mentioned “unexpected issues” and that’s that. Not sure about you, but I find this to be quite unreasonable considering the number of sites that were affected by this outage.

Yesterday, I was having problems accessing several of my sites and that of client’s. Tried BlueHost’s home page and that was down too. I suspected something was going on, and a quick search on Twitter, revealed that there was in fact an ongoing issue. The number of tweets (and counting) from people asking for help, asking questions, etc., is just mind boggling.

Anyway, all is somewhat normal today already and I hope that this incident, if it affected you, did not cost you that much. Until this “unexpected issue” happened, I did not know that the Endurance Group actually owns several hosting companies under its umbrella. Here’s a list of all their hosting companies, just in case you want to know.

What do think about this incident? Do you think that this could cause the company’s reputation? Should their PR damage control team have handled this differently, rather than “we are working on it and should be back momentarily”?

As usual, in no particular order:

SEO & Internet Marketing

Social/Blogging/Small Business Bites

More cool stuff!

And this is a repeat of last week’s roundup, in case you’ve missed it. Here’s a cool deal for all of you (not sponsored or anything, just really cool). In case you have not yet seen it, WMPU.org has a magic link for an insane 90 day free trial on CrazyEgg. If you don’t know what CrazyEgg is, then I suggest you head over there and signup for the 90 freebie.

That’s it! Enjoy and have a great weekend!

DiTesco

DiTesco is a Business and Inbound Marketing Consultant, and founder of iBlogzone.com. iBlogzone's main objective is to help startups and small business owners achieve success in their online ventures. | More About Me and my Digital Marketing Services in SP Brazil.

26 thoughts on “Google’s 200 Ranking Factors, YouTube Tools, Bluehost Massive Outage, Speedlink 31:2013”

  • Yeah I’d also heard the news on mashable. Such downtimes really compromise their SLAs and business productivity of their clients. Thats why cloud based hosting services are recommended. Got my site (towntawks.com) also remained down and I was so frustrated that it took me 2 hours to complete my blogpost which was not more than a 15 min task :-/

    • Sorry to hear that you were also affected. Hope all is well now.

      • Yeah its working fine now. But you know BlueHost kinda sucks. I am on shared hosting services and the maximum file limit is 200k whereas total number of my files are at max 50k. But still they are warning me that they will reduce the throughput to my website. Poor SLA and pathetic customer support.

  • These factors r really frustrating.. I should also be careful specially about keywords and backlinks…

    • With all the care that one should be doing, makes as think what it is we can actually do 🙂

  • Hi DiTesco…

    I am a victim of yesterday`s problem… I have BluHost account and I was terrified yesterday morning when I got the message “Your website is no longer available”…

    Seriously I almost had a heart attack… I tried to log in to my CPanel but it gave a message “Log in failed”…. I tried to call the customer care.. waiting… waiting… waiting…..

    At last I decided to call “SiteLock” my website security provider through BlueHost…. From their customer care I came to know about the situation as like me many of their clients already called them to know whether any security problem is there on not… eufffff… what an experience!!!!.. 🙂

    • Hi Karmakar,

      I can totally relate with your “near to having a heart attack” 🙂 Imagine when I saw that not one of all the sites I manage were no where to be found… Oh well, just glad all is back up. Thanks for sharing your experience.

  • Francisco,
    I was affected by the outage yesterday as I host several sites with both HostGator and BlueHost. At the very least, we’re owed an apology by the the Endurance Group. They need to do some serious PR work to recover from this one. There already had been some serious grumblings and stories of bloggers moving to other hosting provider prior to this. I certainly won’t be hosting any new sites with any provider who is associated with them.

    • Totally agree with you Sheryl. An apology is in order. Not sure, but as of now, I have not seen any from EG. Seems like business as usual for them. Oh well…

  • I didn’t even hear or see anything about the outage. But, aren’t they supposed to have backup plans for downtimes like this? Well, I guess that’s inevitable. However they suck at rendering apology.

    And about the 200 Google page rank factors, I can’t thank you enough for that. Some of them I know, some I don’t. Now, its time for me to read up the infographic.

  • hi DiTesco this is such a geat and informative post and I would like to say that is qality is better then quantity if you will make backlinks and in Social signlas, it is one of the best way to get traffic on your blog.

  • Nice lists of ranking factors… actually that’s a lot and most of them I haven’t tried yet..

  • Didn’t know about the new YT features and off to check out the Crazy Egg offer – I’d be too crazy to turn it down!

    • LOL Ana, have to be crazy indeed not to take advantage of that “crazy” offer.. Let me know how you like the “heat maps” and everything else.

  • I use Bluehost myself and that outage really shook some faith in them. Not having too much experience with hosting companies that was my first issue EVER with Bluehost at all. I can say though that their customer service always grabs extra points from me. Very professional.

    • Hi Drew. Their customer service is not that bad, when you don´t have to wait forever 🙂 I know what happened was an “unexpected issue” as they said, so that´s a discount for them.

  • Hostgator and blue host are some of the best hostin,g but do you know which one is that fastest/.

    • Hi Timothy. Can´t tell because I have no experience with Hostgator. Some say Hostgator is a tad faster though

  • I don’t use Bluehost though, but my host ever have such problem too. whether it affect the company reputation or not I think depends on how much trust the costumer give to the company. The bigger the trust the better the company ability to ease the damage.

  • Thanks for the informative post! I think that link building is still a very valid way to achieve good site ranking. However, link building has to be approached in a responsible and mature way, links have to be relevant and tie in well with the subject matter and ethos of the site in question.
    It is far better to have a handful of good relevant links than to have a million ridiculous links pointing to your site. As with everything else associated with SEO or anything to do with site value at all, quality always before quantity. Thank you and your helpers for all the research and information.

  • oh my God !!!
    It’s really shocking for me & I be shocked when I read title “Google’s 200 Ranking Factors” I just know only few Ranking Factors but I never turn toward 200 Ranking Factors. Appreciable post!!!

  • Thanks a lot for the link to the 200 ranking factors, bookmarked that straight away. I am really glad Google changed their system, the genuine webmaster of a small website never had a chance against companies that just paid to get to the top. Since the update, requests for guest posts on my sites has shot down.

    • That’s interesting about guest post request shutting down. So to show you that many of them were just “link builders” and provide nothing of value. Probably better off that way. What do you think?

      • I much prefer it to be honest. Fair enough, you don’t get that additional content on your site but there are more pros than cons this way.

  • Content marketing matters when it comes to building a successful business online. Of all the things you can do to ensure your online business succeeds, the most important thing of all is your content marketing strategy.

  • After reading this, I am going to do much more video. As well, I really think it is crucial that we engage with other bloggers, like yourself, to discover important link building practices so we have more success.

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