The Lesser-Known (Hidden) Ranking Signals You Need to Be Aware of

I’m not going to write you another post on “X ranking signals you need to know about” and then rattle off title tags, metadata, content, domain age, backlinks, etc., etc., etc. You knew all that, and have probably been reading about it for years. 

It’s also well-known that Google has hundreds of ranking signals that it ultimately uses to assign, and change, rankings on a daily basis. Again, most of these are known. 

So what I’m going to take the opportunity to do here is shed some light on some lesser-known ranking signals, that some SEO folks call “hidden” ranking signals. These are some of the ones of which you should be aware. 

Dwell Time 

Dwell time is an interesting ranking signal that suggests not just that how much time users spend on your page can influence position, but potentially how much time users spend simply hovering over the entry on the search engine results page.

First let’s look at what we know. Dwell time refers to how long a user spends on a page after clicking on a link in the search results. 

If you click on a link immediately, then find that the page was unusable, and bounce within, say, 3 seconds, that’s really low dwell time. Google doesn’t like that, and is likely to penalize the entry with low dwell time. 

Now let’s say when you went back to the SERPs and clicked on a different link, but then spent a solid 5 minutes reading what was on the page, or, in the case of transactional or commercial searches, clicked and made a purchase after spending some time on the page, Google sees that 5 minute dwell time as a good thing, and the page in question is likely to climb the SERPs. 

But there is another potential element associated with dwell time, which has to do with how Google heat-maps its SERPs. 

This is all cutting-edge stuff and unconfirmed at the present time, at least to my knowledge, but I’ve heard from others in my field (and read) that the longer a user’s cursor hovers can have an impact on ranking. A quick scroll right past is inherently a bad thing, but a short, or prolonged hover, can possibly influence ranking, whether or not it results in a click – although a click is, invariably, better.

Bounce Rate

Now let’s talk about bounce rate, which is like dwell time, but not the same thing. A bounce occurs when a user clicks on a webpage, and then takes no other action on that webpage, and does not click-through to anything else on the website. 

It doesn’t matter if the user was there for 10 seconds or 3 hours, if they don’t take any other navigational steps on that page, it’s a bounce. 

Now, a bounce does not necessarily have to be a bad thing. For instance, many blogs have very high bounce rates, because usually people read blogs to find answers to their questions and once that intent is satisfied, they leave. Google knows this, and depending on what type of content your website furnishes, if you have high time on page (dwell time), a high bounce won’t hurt you. 

However, if your website is ranking for a whole bunch of transactional or commercial keywords, (as many of our clients do) and your website has a high bounce rate, that very well is likely to be a bad thing. 

Here’s why. If your website ranks, and gets clicks, for transactional or commercial keywords, and you have a very high bounce rate (which necessitates a low conversion rate) then Google knows that, at least in a large portion of cases, your website is not delivering on search intent, and rankings will fall.

Which makes this a very curious ranking signal, and one that is important to understand with its nuances. 

Image Optimization 

I’m including image optimization here only because there is a whole search element dedicated to it: Google Image Search. 

Sure, people may rarely use it, but it is a gigantic portion of the entirety of the search results nonetheless, and failing to optimize images, at least some of them, is leaving big potential on the table. 

Moreover (and I know this firsthand, from experience) not only is the Image Search “portion” of Google not saturated with nonsense (at least not yet), very, very few SEO experts actually take the time to optimize images properly, despite the fact that it is so, so easy to do. 

Partly due to the fact that that corner of the search results is not saturated, I have seen great success optimizing images for the search results. In fact, I’ve written about this at length. 

It also has to be the lowest hanging-fruit in the whole SEO-world. Really, all you need is an original image (one that looks good, if it looks terrible, no one will click on it), a keyword or a few keywords to put in the alt text field and the caption, and you need to make sure you compress the image before you upload it so it doesn’t overload the page. 

That’s about all there is to it, and it’s very easy to get images to rank. If all you can get is an image to rank because your pages don’t have authority, those are still impressions you’d get if you had no other avenue – and for beginners and startups, any impressions are better than none. 

Backlink Page Authority 

So much attention has been given to earning and sowing backlinks that I’m sick of it. Just as I’ve personally seen images rank very effectively based solely on my own efforts, so too have I seen websites with basically no authority at all – I’m talking less than 10, per Moz – rank not just on page one, but in position one, sometimes in featured snippets or the AI Overview, with nothing but copy alone. 

Therefore, links aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. There, I said it. Are they a ranking signal, and do they help SEO efforts? Yes to both, potentially, provided one very important thing: reasonable backlink page authority. 

Let’s say your website has a new link, and it’s from some low-DA website that you’ve never heard of, in some vertical totally, hopelessly irrelevant to your website’s or business’s niche. And let’s say that website has a high spam density or score. 

Guess what. That link is not only not going to help your SEO efforts in any way. It is actively going to hurt them. 

So while link profile is one element to a healthy SEO strategy, and while I still hold the basic belief that high quality links can produce referral traffic, improve average positions for certain target keywords, and boost domain authority, I will tell you point blank that a link is only valuable when it comes from a low-spam, authoritative source. 

Anchor Text 

Obviously, website structure, if it is intelligible, is a ranking signal that Google will use to evaluate the quality of the pages on your website. It can also affect user time on page and sessions, which are also ranking signals. 

Links are a part of website navigation, but I’m going to peel back the layers further here. Anchor text, not just the presence of links, can also be an impactful ranking signal – to the pages to which and from which it links.

Just take a look at this page I’m writing right now. A good example of anchor text, to this page from another page on 1Digital’s website, would be “types of ranking signals” or just “ranking signals,” because this blog addresses those topics and concepts. 

However, it would be unwise of me to use that anchor text in a link from this blog to another page on our website (or worse, to another domain) because Google would then assume that this page was deferring authority for that keyword to the other page or domain. 

Similarly, it would make sense for me to link to our eCommerce SEO services page from this page, since that page has a lot of authoritative information on that topic. 

See what I’m saying? Anchor text matters – not a huge deal, but it does. What I’m trying to get at here is when you decide what anchor text to use for links within your website, think about what you want the page you’re linking to to rank for. The worst thing you can do is use anchor text like “this page” or “click here.” These mean nothing to Google and provide no contextual relevance.

(By the way, if you want to learn how to write effective anchor text, check that out.)

Consistency 

This might sound simple, but consistency is a ranking factor, and by that, I mean if your website constantly puts up new product pages or posts new blogs or CMS pages, say, a few times per week, and then goes silent for months at a time, that is not going to look good. 

I have personally seen websites take ranking hits because they were once consistent and fell into a lull. I get it, it’s not always possible to keep up the same pace, but you can’t let things fall entirely off the map either. 

The point is that you need to keep up with it, even if all you’re doing is refreshing a few pages periodically. Google sees it and for whatever reason, it makes a difference. 

Also I should note that I have seen that the performance and average position of old pages is also affected by consistency, as well as the publication of new pages. So it isn’t just about making sure your new pages have a chance to rank and be seen, but that your old performers don’t fall off. 

The bottom line: keep at it. The effort you put in is, itself, a ranking signal. 

Take Note of These But Don’t Neglect Other Ranking Signals, Either

It may be 2025, but I couldn’t say this more plainly. Best practices are still best practices. Don’t think because I didn’t mention on-page copy and page titles in this post that you should suddenly neglect them as ranking factors. You should optimize them as you always have, but also pay some mind to the “hidden” ranking signals mentioned in here.

Do so, and your SEO (and AEO) results will flourish.