9 Factors “Not At All” Affecting Your Google Ranking

Google practices nearly 200 different ranking factors to rank any website.

There are a few aspects on your site that may not affect your rankings. People are making mistakes when they think these following factors are going to have influence on their rankings.

So, it is good to be aware of these aspects to know where to focus your time on.

Here, are 9 factors that Google doesn’t care about:

1) The Age of Your Website

Google doesn’t care about the age of your website, whether it is registered in 1997 or 2008 or 2016. The only thing that is important how useful your content and how it helps people. You’ve built up good links and authority signals which would be more of a relevant factor to Google.

Example- If you registered your site in 2016, and have built up all authority signals. Google will be going to favor that site even more as it is built the same authority in a very small period of time.

2) Keywords in Image Alt Text

Keywords in image alt text won’t directly affect your ranking. Alt text is important because of the effect it has on your user’s experience not because it will improve your search engine ranking. It helps resolve image indication problems.

3) Likes, Shares, Plus-ones, Tweet Counts

If you have a Facebook or Twitter accounts and it shows that you have 20000 or 25000 shares on that page. Google doesn’t care about it and even it doesn’t notice these points.  

But if people share it on Facebook and also did other activities that resulted in lots of browser activity, click-through activity, increased branding, and brand preference for you in the search results. Google cares a lot about these things but this directly has no impact on Google ranking.

4) Higher Bounce Rates

If you find that people are spending less time say 2-3 minutes on the site and you see your industry benchmark lower than the average, this doesn’t affect your Google ranking.

It could be that you are serving faster loading page and people get the information that they need more rapidly, and so, their time on site may be lower but the bounce rate could be higher.

5) Using Headlines and Header Tags

Everyone thinks if the headline is placed in an H2 tag rather than H1 it will be considered less important.  But, the fact is Google doesn’t care at all whether you use H1 or H2 or H3 headline tag. They just look at the content and say this one is big at the top and bold. That must be a headline. This one is lower down and smaller.

These headlines are used for design purposes and for HTML and CSS but from Google’s point of view, it has no impact on ranking.

6) Information on the right-hand side of search results

Sometimes you get the information panel on the right side that can show you around the web and sometimes Wikipedia information. This doesn’t affect your ranking for any other search query.

After a while, sites tend to build site links and knowledge panels as their brands become bigger & better and as they get more coverage around the web and online or offline. So, this is not that you worry about.

7) Using cheaper hosting or shared hosting options

Well, this affects speed or page loading time but it won’t directly affect the web ranking. So, it won’t matter.

It depends on you that you are using solo hosting or paying more for hosting options. Google doesn’t concern about it.

8) Using Google services and apps

People think Google can access your data from Google services & apps even though this is not right and whether you use or not you use the services; it does not have an impact on your rankings.

9) Characters where separators are used as title element

The title of the page is in the header of a document and is the brand name and then a separator and some words and phrases the brand name.

It does not matter if that separator is the pipe bar or a hyphen or a colon or any other special character that you would like to use. Google won’t care about this and it’s up to you which way you want it.