Brian Dean needs no introduction. He’s the hugely popular and widely respected author of Backlinko.com, as well as the co-founder of my new favorite tool, ExplodingTopics.com. And Brian has just published a new study on first page rankings.
Here’s a quick glimpse into his findings:
“Our data shows that a site’s overall link authority (as measured by Ahrefs Domain Rating) strongly correlates with higher rankings.
Pages with lots of backlinks rank above pages that don’t have as many backlinks. In fact, the #1 result in Google has an average of 3.8x more backlinks than positions #2-#10.
We found no correlation between page loading speed (as measured by Alexa) and first page Google rankings.”
To get the rest of his study’s findings, and for all the backstory including deep dive analytics with graphs and tables, check out his article at Backlinko.com.
