Written by Admin Alex · Fact-Checked by M.Ali · Info Verified September 2026
We review and update this article regularly as new information becomes available.
TL;DR: A new survey from Cyrus Shepard and Dawn Shepard asked 131 SEO practitioners to rate 103 possible Google ranking factors, generating over 13,000 data points. Relevance came out on top, backlinks held strong in second place, and meta descriptions landed dead last, with most respondents saying they carry no ranking weight at all.
Every year someone tries to settle the “is X still a ranking factor” arguments with data instead of vibes. This year it’s Cyrus Shepard and Dawn Shepard, publishing through their Zyppy Signal newsletter, and the sample size is big enough to actually take seriously: 131 working SEO professionals, rating 103 different potential ranking signals on a seven-point scale from strongly negative to strongly positive.
The researchers contacted more than 200 practitioners to land that final panel of 131, and the group collectively spent 43.6 hours, 2,620 minutes, working through the survey. The result is 13,665 individual ranking-factor observations. That’s not a hot take. That’s a dataset.
The top of the list, and no big surprises
Relevance came in first, named among the top three factors by 57.1% of respondents. Backlinks followed close behind at 54.8%, which should put to rest, at least for another year, the periodic claims that links have stopped mattering. Content quality rounded out the top three at 47.6%.
After that, the list gets more interesting: authority and trust at 36.5%, behavior and click signals at 29.4%, brand signals at 27.0%, user satisfaction and task completion at 19.8%, technical SEO health at 17.5%, topical authority at 14.3%, and internal links closing out the top ten at 11.1%.
Notice what’s missing from the top ten entirely: keyword density, exact-match domains, any of the mechanical, old-school tactics that used to dominate SEO checklists. The practitioners in this survey are rating relevance, trust, and actual user satisfaction well above anything you can brute-force with formatting tricks.
The factor that got voted off the island
Meta descriptions took the biggest hit in this survey. Most respondents rated it as having no ranking impact whatsoever, which lines up with what Google has said publicly for years, that meta descriptions influence click-through rate from the results page, not rankings themselves. Plenty of sites still treat a well-written meta description as an SEO task. This data says it’s a CTR task wearing an SEO costume.
The quote that explains the whole survey
One line from the research sums up the entire ranking-factor debate better than any individual data point: “You can have technically perfect content with pristine headings and a gorgeous URL structure, but if the person searching wanted one thing and you answered another, none of that saves you.” That’s relevance in a sentence, and it’s exactly why relevance beat every other factor in the survey, including backlinks.
What this actually means for your content plan
If your team is still splitting SEO effort evenly across technical fixes, backlink outreach, and content quality, this data suggests a rebalance: match search intent first, build genuine authority and backlinks second, and treat technical SEO and internal linking as important but secondary maintenance rather than the main event. And if someone on your team is still agonizing over meta description keyword placement, redirect that time toward literally anything else on this list.
Bottom Line
Backlinks surviving at 54.8% is the real headline here, because plenty of SEO commentary over the past two years has tried to bury them. A 131-person, 13,665-observation survey saying otherwise is worth more than another blog post insisting links are dead. Relevance still wins overall, but link building isn’t going anywhere either.
