Put it simply, Google patent is a information retrieval based on historical data. You can get a thorough review of this topic at SEOmoz http://www.seomoz.org/article/google-historical-data-patent. So why would you read here? Well, I am just going to talk about my own experience and my own thoughts.
There are 5 critical points in that paper:
Google’s Concept of “Document Inception”
The date of “document inception”, which can refer to either a website as a whole or a single page is used in many different areas by Google. This data can come from the registration info, the date Google first found a link to the site/page or the site/page itself. Google will be using this data to rank documents and establish credibility and relevance.
My thoughts:
That is exactly why when you have a new page, you can get it indexed by Google in 24 hours if you can get a backlink from a high PR website. If you have a new site, you don’t need to spend big bucks to get a high quality link. You can use a free service from site like squidoo or hubpage. If you start writing some topic there and link back to your site, you site should get indexed by Google in 72 hours.
How Changing Content can Affect Rankings
Changing content over time has a huge impact in Google’s measures according to this patent. They use changes to determine “freshness” or “staleness” of websites and pages and how that data impacts the value of the links on the page as well its rankings. They’ll also measure large, “real”, content changes vs. superfluous changes and rank based on that data.
Google also says that for some types of queries, particular results are more valuable - stale results may be desirable for information that doesn’t need updating, fresh content is good for results that require it, seasonal results may pop up or down in the rankings based on the time of month/year, etc.
My thoughts:
Yes, freshness! Google loves new content and that is why blogs can do better than other types of sites. Thus, you need to provide your visitor updated information. You ever wondered why sometimes e-commerce sites rank better than a content-driven site? New and fresh content would be the reason. E-commerce site always update their product listings and show new promotions while some content driven sites shows only static shopping guides. Another finding is that it seems the more product listings a page has, the better ranking. But I am not sure about this.
Spam Detection & Punishment
Google is employing many new systems of spam detection and prevention according to the patent. These include:
- Watching for sites that rise in the rankings too quickly
- Watching for registration information, IP addresses, name servers, hosts, etc that are on their “bad list”
- Growth of off-topic links
- Speed of link gain
- Percentage of similar anchor text
- Topic/Subject shifts or additions
My thoughts:
Aggressive link building strategy probably won’t work anymore. I have worked for a company that decides to spend lots of $$ for getting a keyword ranked. We bought tons of articles, did tons of directory submission and did a lot of blog posts. Guess what, 1 month later, it worked. The company’s web page get to the 1st page of Google for a very competitive keywords. However, this only lasted for 3 months, and now get pushed back to 3rd page again.
I will talk about next 2 factors in my next post.
