So does Google really have 200 ranking factors?

200 ranking factors (or more commonly expressed “over 200") is the figure Google spokespeople have given out for many years, and in print as recently as last year. But a Webmaster World thread started by Roger Montti mocks that number, asking if anyone believes it any more than they believe in Santa Claus.

My take:

• It’s most likely Google public shorthand for “there are a whole lot of ranking factors” and not meant to express a precise number.
• How many factors there are (beyond that there are a lot) isn’t useful information because we know about relatively few of them, and can guess at some more, but the vast majority of them are unknown to us.
• Furthermore, for any given query it’s likely that only some subset of the available factors is in play, and that grouping changes not only according to the query itself, but also it’s intent, the history and location of the user, and probably a number of other possible filters that decide which mix of factors should be used.
• It’s also likely that many of these so-called factors are actually categories containing many sub-factors.

In any case, all of this serves to underscore that it is more absurd than ever to try to optimize for individual factors. (There are, however, cases where at least doing that is important, such as for known local factors when localization is relevant.)

As my CEO Eric Enge has written, in most cases you can reduce the “factors” you need to care about down to two: links to your page and content quality/user experience.