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!

Here’s an interesting Google development test I came across recently — double-column, non-collapsable organic results for a single brand.

• The example in the picture is a semi-branded term, but I swear I’ve seen this in action on generic keywords.
• The lucky brand dominates the page, pushing down all the other results
• There’s no apparent reason why these particular pages are chosen (I’ve seen really obscure, deep pages returned, so it’s not due to internal links, page authority or jump links)
• I confirmed it works whilst logged out
• I confirmed it works on any browser
• It works as part of Google Instant

Unfortunately, I can’t replicate the results on my own computers, hence the low quality screenshot.

What does this mean?

At this point, it just means that Google is testing the search result layouts again.

However, if it does get rolled out then obviously expect an outcry at brands dropping 12 places on terms such as “car insurance” (tested and confirmed!).