Are there really 200+ Google ranking factors?

[SenseiSteve]

I just read an article written in 2018 on Search Engine Journal titled, 11 Things You Must Know About Google’s 200 Ranking Factors.

First, it says - One thing we know for sure: there aren’t 200 ranking factors. It's a myth.
Next up - OK, I can’t really prove without a doubt that there aren’t actually 200 ranking factors.

So what is it? Are there really 200+ ranking factors?

 

[bigredseo]

There are well over 200 factors for ranking, but they're not all things that a webmaster has control of. Backlinko did an article in 2020 which highlighted many of the 200 ranking factors, but there's more to it than just "does it have a meta tag".

Between the massive list, and the new changes that have happened in recent years (think RankBrain, BERT, Natural Language, Passages [paragraph analysis], etc) just continues to expand the number.