This data, showing a line that's very spiky and error bars showing

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But even more, this chart supports the idea that earning links from unique domains is paramount. [UPDATE (Oct 26, 2009): Previously there was a paragraph speculating why the above result for the importance of unique linking domains was so much lower than we previously calculated. As noted at the top of this post, this was because I used the wrong datapoint for unique domains linking. Correcting this made the discrepancy with earlier results disappear. The chart above is now correct.


The frustrating part about this data is that it's no email lists australia t telling us the entire story, nor is it directly actionable for an individual search query. As you can see below, the standard deviation numbers show that for any given search, the range varies somewhat dramatically. When we see this effect, just as we did above, takeaway for an SEO doing work on a client project and attempting to achieve a particular ranking position is unclear. Employing these metrics as KPIs and ways of valuing potential links is probably useful, and building competitive analysis tracking with these data points is likely to be considerably better than using more classic third-party metrics, but it doesn't say "do this to rank better," and that's the "holy grail" we're chasing.





How Do "On-Page" Factors Correlate with Rankings? This post has dealt very little with on-page factors and their correlation to rankings. We'll look at that next. Google recently announced that they ignore the meta keywords tag. stderr (standard error) all within the horizontal at "13" certainly supports that assertion. Employing the query term/phrase in the meta keywords is one of the least correlated signals we've examined.