Google Rankings Actually Decided By 10,000 Signals Compared To Bing’s 1,000

At the latest PubCon, which took place in Las Vegas on November 8^th, Matt Cutts was answering a particularly interesting question from the nice chaps down at Search Engine Land…

The background to this question lies in the factors or signals search engines declare that they use to decide where to rank your website. Google for a long time has stated that it uses 200 signals to judge where to place your listing. These can range from how many quality links you have to the strength of the domains to which you are linked, not to mention the quality of your content. For a while this was accepted as a pretty nice number, until October when Bing announced it had 1,000 ranking signals!

Thanks to a question by Barry Schwartz put directly to Matt Cutts, we now know that Google in fact use 10,000 signals, and have done all along! How is that true you might ask? Well it seems that of the original 200 factors, there are 50 variables of each, making exactly 10,000 signals altogether.

Let’s wait and see if Bing come out and claim they have 10,001 signals then Google will claim they have 50 variables of the 50 variables of the original 200 signals making 500,000 signals and then Bing will come out and say…and so on. While this may seem like a bit of handbags, people need to remember that you make websites for people (customers) and not for algorithms, so should stop worrying about factors and concentrate on getting your websites working well and full of awesome content.

Find out what other tasty search/Google related titbits Matt Cutts mentioned here.

In other news…

One of the original Apple computers, built in 1976 by Jobs and Wozniak themselves, is going on sale for nearly a quarter of a million dollars at Christies in London on November 23rd. It comes with a signed letter by Steve Jobs too. Details of what you get on Christies website here.

Good luck checking your emails on it though…

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• New Android Phone Promises A Pure Experience - December 7, 2010
• Google AdWords Wants Your Products! - December 3, 2010
• Know How Mobile Internet Affects Your Website? Google Analytics does… - December 2, 2010

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