PPC

Moz Releases 2015 Search Engine Ranking Factors Study

moz-ranking-study

Moz has now published their 2015 search ranking factors, which they claim to the largest study they’ve done yet on this topic.

The study ranks the various search ranking factors based on (a) asking industry experts their thoughts on over 90 factors and (b) using correlation studies to measure the search results and rankings. This year, Moz interviewed 150 leading search marketers who provided expert opinions on over 90 ranking factors. Moz didn’t only use their data for the correlation portion of the study, but they also used data from SimilarWeb, DomainTools, and Ahrefs.

The short version is that links to the domain and page level, including the anchor text, still is the highest factor for Google rankings. The lowest ranking factor is social metrics, TLDs and basic on-page markup, such as href lang and schema.

Here is the infographic of the summary of the results:

rankingfactors-info

You can see the full study over here.

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Editorial disclosure

Search Engine Land is owned by Semrush. We remain committed to providing high-quality coverage of marketing topics. Unless otherwise noted, this page’s content was written by either an employee or a paid contractor of Semrush Inc.

About the author

Barry Schwartz
Barry Schwartz is a technologist and a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics.

In 2019, Barry was awarded the Outstanding Community Services Award from Search Engine Land, in 2018 he was awarded the US Search Awards the "US Search Personality Of The Year," you can learn more over here and in 2023 he was listed as a top 50 most influential PPCer by Marketing O'Clock.

Barry can be followed on X here and you can learn more about Barry Schwartz over here or on his personal site.