Moz Releases 2015 Search Engine Ranking Factors 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:

You can see the full study over here.

About The Author

Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz 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. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here.