Google's 2 Secret Ranking Signals Leaked in Court (Everyone's Been Wrong)

I'll be short today I swear.

Google's entire ranking system boils down to two signals.

Quality (Q*) and Popularity (P*).

Everything else just feeds into these.

Q* is a site-wide trust score that Google calculates once and applies everywhere meaning if your domain looks sketchy you're dead before you start.

P* uses 13 months of user behavior data from Chrome tracking whether people actually find what they need on your site or bounce back to search, NavBoost knows if users are satisfied AND siteAuthority is 100% real and it's based on how many people search for your brand name directly. So while everyone's obsessing over just backlinks and keywords the actual game is becoming an entity Google trusts through real user satisfaction and brand recognition, that's it, that's the whole game.

I personally saw (as Gabriele Asaro of Laid Back Llama) the pattern of many new sites of our clients having tons of traffic coming from outside sources like social and influencers and getting insane boosts in rankings with huge keywords and practically almost no links as well.

If traffic drops a lot though, I can guarantee you'll see that you'll lose rankings too btw.

SO, start getting creative and find ways to get tons of traffic, then leverage that to win big keywords and optimize your pages for user retention and conversion :)

SOURCE.