131 SEO experts name relevance and links as top factors
It is expert opinion rather than data from Google, and one SEO says parts of it are nonsense.
A new survey asked 131 SEO practitioners what actually affects where you rank in Google. The top three answers were relevance at 57.1%, backlinks at 54.8% and content quality at 47.6%.
The survey was put together by Cyrus Shepard, who posts as @cyrusshepard. He says the experts contributed over 13,000 data points across nine areas, including relevance, backlinks, content quality, brand and reputation, technical SEO and, new this year, Google AI ranking factors. Aleyda Solis, one of the contributors, posted the full top ten.
What the top answers mean
Relevance means your page matches what the person searching actually wants. In Solis's summary, content is relevant if it semantically matches what the user is looking for and satisfies their needs.
Backlinks are links from other sites to yours. The survey write-up says reports of their death have been greatly exaggerated, and that experts rated links from trusted, relevant sites near the top. Many stressed links from pages that get real visitors.
Content quality covers originality, accuracy and freshness. After those three came authority and trust at 36.5%, click behaviour at 29.4% and brand signals at 27.0%. Internal links, meaning links between pages on your own site, came last of the ten at 11.1%.
Not everyone agrees
This is opinion from practitioners, not data published by Google. David G Quaid attacked the results, pointing out that 17% of respondents named meta descriptions as a top ranking factor. A meta description is the summary text under your title in search results. That is about 20 people, and Quaid says his mother knows meta descriptions are meaningless.
Glenn Gabe added something the list mostly skips. He says Google has site-level quality algorithms that can have a huge impact on rankings for content published on the site, often calculated across the whole hostname. In plain terms, weak pages can drag down the pages you care about. That lines up with our earlier story on bulk-made pages.
One more line from the survey is worth keeping. Cyrus Shepard shared a comment from contributor Everett Sizemore arguing that using AI to publish ten times more content of the same quality is worse than publishing the same amount at ten times the quality.
What to do
Nothing here is a change to Google, so there is no emergency fix. If you want one job from it, pick your most important page and check it answers the exact question someone types before they land on it. Rewrite the parts that do not.
Using AI to help you publish ten times the amount of the same quality content in half the time is not as good as using AI to help you publish the same amount of content, but ten times the quality.
Even my mother knows that meta-descriptions are meaningless