Searchmetrics US Ranking Factors 2012

Main takeaways

• Social data equals high rankings basically.  It is said that having more socal shares gets you in front of more people thus more links I think it’s the raw number of Likes and Tweets which is the ranking factor
• Don’t be too concerned with missing out on followed exact match links, a mix of links has a better effect on rankings.  Shorter links also perform very well

Disagreements

• Big brands don’t need to be as concerned with onpage as much as small brands as their brand signals helps them rank higher anyway

Surprises

• Keyword domains doing so so well, thought it would be the opposite
• Optimized title tags counting for so little, used to be an easy fix with big results
• Negative correlation between text length and rankings, thought the lengthier the content the better it would perform