1. Investment: the Length of your Domain Registration

Google will always value quality website and quality content. The length of registration that a domain is registered for is one more indicator for Google that a site is here to stay and that its owners have put some efforts into it. This fact is mentioned in the Google patent for its PageRank. In simple words: register your domain for at least 3-5 years for an improved recognition from Google.

See more: Does the Length of a Domain Registration Affect Your Rank?

2. Performance: Fast Sites Rank Higher

Again, if you are serious about your site you will make sure that your users can read your site fast. In some cases it takes some effort to improve a site’s performance, in particular with dynamic content such as a CMS or a Shopping Cart. Make sure to use the right software, apply updates (usually contain performance improvements), and consider tightening up the server’s configuration. A good rule of thumb for serving pages is an average of one second per page or less, with a half a second or less and you are a head of the pack.

See more: Landing page load time now affects keywords’ Quality Scores

3. History: the Age of Sites Linking to Yours Matter

Having incoming links to your sites is what you want. However, it will take time before you will see any significant result. This is because Google measure the age of incoming links to your site and ranks older links with a higher ranking. There is not much here that can be done except make sure that links to your main site remain indefinitely and avoid short term incoming links. Also, if you were considering disposing of an old site that somehow links to your main site – reconsider leaving it as is and letting the links mature like wine.

Many factors are at play here: the age of the domains from which links are pointing to pages on your site, The age of the links themselves, and the age of your own domain. In short, the older the links and domains, the higher the ranking or the rank influence overall.

See more: The Age of a Domain Name

4. Uniqueness: Canonical URL

Every site can decide what is the full URL that it will use. Most sites add the ‘www’ in front of the actual registered domain and some ommit. The dangerous teritory is when sites are dynamically generated, like a DB backed CMS, and links are relative. Hence if a third party linked to your site with the ‘www’ and another third party linked to your site without – it will produce identical content pages with different URLs. From Google’s perspective ‘www.yoursite.com’ and ‘yoursite.com’ are two different URLs. To solve this issue, setup a redirect to your preferred URL – your preferred URL is what is known as Canonical URL.

See more: SEO Advice: URL Canonicalization,  Cleaning Up Canonical URLs With Redirects

5. Relevance: Google Uses Geolocation to Serve Local Sites

Once more Google is simply trying to do its job: serve pages that are most relevant to you – the search user. Hence, it will retrieve the geolocation for a site and will rank higher local sites to local users. The geolocation data is derived from the IP address. Hence, to get more traffic from Canadian users for example, host your site in Canada.

Peculiar but simple, isn’t it?

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