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For Google I say 90% links and 10% content.
it's impossible give priority to content.. a lot of websites have the same content..
Yes, and there's going to be a lot of teeth-gnashing and wailing on this forum as Google gets better at identifying and devaluing boilerplate content.
Yes, and there's going to be a lot of teeth-gnashing and wailing on this forum as Google gets better at identifying and devaluingartificial linking tricks. :)
Unfortunately, there's a "lot of teeth-gnashing and wailing" whenever Google changes ANYTHING! ;)
My gut says it's closer to 50% content and 50% links presently, based purely on anecdotal evidence derived from only a dozen sites.
What factors about that content seem to contribute such a great deal (50%) in your cases?
The most significant single on page factor (and the only one I'm willing to share :) ) is consistency. If your title and description metas, and your H1 (or the visible title in your content) all contain your primary keywords and reinforce each other topically, you're over halfway there for on page factors.
Perhaps this sounds too simple but I've been competing with several sites with similar linkage for about 10 months. By simply "tuning" until I got it right, changing a few words here and there on a page, I've DOMINATED those competitors for the past 9 weeks and fully expect that to continue for some time. It's more art than science too, so it's difficult to describe in detail.
GRKDA is an excellent tool for this kind of tuning.
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I just realized that I'm dead wrong! Upon reflection, if a new competitor were to begin competing for the same keywords as me, with substantially better linkage, or one of my present competitors suddenly gained significant links, "my site" would very likely be second fiddle once again. My experience is that in a group of PR 5 sites, the one with best on page optimization ranks best.
But linkage gets a site into a "PR group," so it is clearly more significant than on page stuff. How much more? OBVIOUSLY, I haven't a clue! :)
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[edited by: DaveAtIFG at 9:26 pm (utc) on Aug. 14, 2004]
From what I've seen unless you are in an extremely competitive field then on page optimization rules over inbound links.
I have quite a few sites with only 1 or 2 inbound links and yet they are at the top in fairly (though not extremely) competitive fields.
I think it goes beyond inbound links and on page factors. It has a lot to do with site structure and internal linking too.
I have also seen that sheer number of pages can reinforce a particular theme and pages can rank highly with good title and support in <p> for keywords in that title.
Since '99, for the home run term, the same company has come up (on Google). Results 2 - infinity vary almost everyday.
The difference between the #1 site and everyone else is one way links.
The #1 site is the oldest company in this space, and all their customers link to them. The #1 site does not have a recip link campaign. They simply blow everyone at of the water with one way links.
Results 2-5 are companies that have hired SEO firms (this I know because the SEO firms are linked to). All of these sites have managed recip link campaigns. The onsite factors don't seem to make any difference in these ranks (I've used software to analyze them).
If onsite factors are making a difference in your space, they are probably acting as tie breakers.
Therefore, my vote would be about 85% links, 15% onsite (Google only).
Links and PR get you into the game... the game being the Top 10 results.
From there it is on-page factors such as the consistency that DaveAtIFG mentions. Also hub-authority linking structures are factored in as well.
Another one is prominence. There are still millions of sites with junky code. The more junk code in the html, the less prominence the page's content is given when spidered (by junk I mean javascript or css in the head, and lots of extra font tags or table tags in the body).
