The first analysis of the in-depth SEOmoz 2011 Search Ranking Factors was released today, and it’s well worth reading.

I was one of the 132 top-tier SEO professionals involved, so I can personally attest to the sheer amount of data SEOmoz have incorporated into the research… we offered to slog through page after page of multiple choice questions, as well as prioritising dauntingly large groups of ranking factors and red-herrings.

It was a long, long evening with the laptop for the love of SEO and the mozzers!

In the full release of the SEOmoz 2011 Search Ranking Factors, I’m really looking forward to reading some of the insightful free-form answers from around the world, but for now the analysis is purely quantitative data and top-level.

Click here to see the initial presentation of the SEOmoz 2011 Search Ranking Factors

The great thing about working with so much SEO ranking data is that it really gives fantastic insights when presented and framed with standard deviation and Spearman’s co-efficient.

If I’ve lost you already, don’t worry! There’s plenty of board-level bullet-points like the example slide below… such as social signals (Facebook and Twitter) are believed to play a much bigger role in future SEO performance!

Last year the fine folk at SEOmoz dropped at bomb that I wasn’t aware of. They claimed that only the anchor text from the first link to a target URL passed relevance. In practical terms, this meant if you linked to a page multiple times from the same page, then you’d better make sure you got your money keyword in the first link text.

Objective

So, do internal links pass relevance from the second occurrence of a link to the same target URL?

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Canonical tags
Do they really consolidate inbound links? How can this be measured?

Link anchor text
Do links pass relevance from the second occurrence of a link to the same target URL?
n.b. My first test results on this are almost ready to publish!

Page title
Despite the aesthetic value of limiting a page title to 70-75 characters for the SERPs or browser, at how many characters past this point will a keyword still pass relevance? 76? 150?

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Bots, scrapers, harvesters etc. It seems they adapt to every new platform from Facebook and Digg through to Q&A sites and IM – and of course microblogging services like Twitter.

Following on from Archibold Teriyaki’s Twitter email spam test, I figured he had a few more uses before becoming too cross-contaminated for me to consider the tests objective.

Objective

If I send an @reply to a new Twitter account from an existing account, will the auto-follow bots be clever enough to follow the new account?

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Inspired by Fantomaster’s… “Do NOT tweet your e-mail address openly if you don’t want to get spammed to hell and back!”

Objective

a) If I tweet a new email address onto the public timeline, will it get picked up as per Fantomaster’s warning?

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