Every couple of years, the digital marketing giant Moz conducts an SEO survey. Essentially, they ask over 100 top industry professionals to give their input on which factors they think are most important. We’ve addressed the 2013 list briefly in the past, but today, they have finally released the full version. It’s full of a lot of interesting stuff, and we can’t wait to really dig into which factors have the largest affect on SEO.
Let’s get started!
For starters, let’s take a look at their raw results. These numbers show the correlation between the factor and the ranking. The higher the correlation, the bigger the affect the factor has on rankings.
-The clear winner here is Page Authority. Clearly the higher your page authority is, the higher you rank in Google. This isn’t especially surprising as Page Authority is a number created by Moz to show exactly that.
-The next biggest factor, and in our opinion, the most interesting item on this list, is the @ of unique cblock links. Here is a great description of what cblocks are all about:
Cblocks refer to the part of the IP address that’s different. The same class C address means something has the same third octect in the address. In the following, the first three IPs are in the same class C, and the fourth address is not.
192.168.1.1
192.168.1.2
192.168.1.3
192.168.100.4The reason we care is that it’s a hint to Google that the sites are all related to each other and on the same server, and that the links may not be very natural since there is the good possibility that the same person set them up.
Clearly, cblocks are just another innovative way for Google to ensure no one is gaming the system.
-The final thing that is interesting about this list is that it’s still all about links. A lot of SEO experts have been saying you need to move away from thinking about links, but that just isn’t true. What you truly need to do is find ways to get quality links from quality sites, and you know how you do that?
Create quality content.