If you hadn’t heard the rumors, Google is getting their search algorithm patented. The US Patent and Trademark Office Application document discusses a lot of things that would be significant to those doing Google SEO. For example, link spamming was discussed rather broadly in the application. The United States Patent Application (#0050071741) has set all-encompassing boundaries on aggressive link building which I support because of the prevalence of Linking Psychosis.
PART OF MY SEO ANALYSIS OF GOOGLE’S ALGORITHM:
But what I don’t agree entirely is the manner in which they perceive the value of web pages by by putting premium on its popularity over time. I don’t believe in the idea that being more popular ought to be perceived as having a superior value but this appears to be what the application paper states.
ADVERTISING SHOWN IN YOUR WEB PAGE INFLUENCES ONES RANK ALSO
Another fascinating item in the application is the manner in which they will rank a website depending on which kinds of advertisements are found on your site. So, if a very popular advertiser like Amazon placed an ad on your page, then this will get high ranking for your website. This is a huge bonus for websites that get to have highly popular corporate names place ads on their pages. But the question is that lets say you have specific services or products available on the website, would you run an Amazon advertisement for the exact services or products just to receive high ranking? Why would anyone promote the competitor’s products or services just to rank higher on search engines? Come to think of it, I wonder how Google will choose the online business who will provide the higher rankings to the websites where their ads appear in. For me this is simply putting additional value to being big and famous rather than putting more value on the attribute and relevance of a website. The document as well makes mention precedent records in relation to a website ranking in a particular point of time, highlighting how its reputation suddenly increases in terms of website traffic whenever the website is 0 and the way it consequently alters its rankings.
One more aspect that is worth mentioning is determining the value of pages based on user maintained and generated data that looks through your browser’s bookmarks and favorites. Now that makes me question if this algorithm aspect is within the boundaries of user privacy. Would you allow Google to crawl into your computer and find out what sites you have bookmarked and saved in your ‘favorites’ folder?
CAN THE AGE OF A DOMAIN AFFECT GOOGLE SEO?
Furthermore, Google will also reference your browser’s cache files as a method of assigning the value of a website. The document also mentions that search engines will examine cookies to learn of the changing fascination (could be upward or downward) of a particular web page. This could also invade the limits of privacy as well. The application document ,in addition, has an entry on imposing additional penalties on recently built websites by giving them poor rankings for a prolonged period of time. For algorithms that are not readily detected and for long term purchases of domain names, the application document maintain that “certain signals may be used to distinguish between illegitimate and legitimate domains. For example, domains can be renewed up to a period of 10 years. Valuable (legitimate) domains rarely are used for more than a year. Therefore, the date when a domain expires in the future can be used as a factor in predicting the legitimacy of a domain and, thus, the documents associated therewith.” If that’s the rationale, then it would be advantageous to simply expand the lifetime of your domain name registrations because it will bestow improved rankings. If approved, this will also change the domain name business given that domain name registrations will become an influential element in a regulating a website’s ranking. This proposal may well result in domain names being be bought and sold rather than being left to expire at the end of their registration periods. Are we looking at selling of domain names as becoming a lucrative business? We’ll see over time if that happens.
THOSE STARTING TO UNDERSTAND SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION SHOULD KEEP THIS IN MIND:
The patent application paper also includes that it will be imposing penalties to sites that are linked to ‘illegitimate’ domains. I hope they discover a method to establish if the links are from competitors that desire to destroy a site by intentionally linking the competitors’ sites to ‘illegitimate’ domains. With all the talk about links connected to quality page rankings, it looks like older content will be at a disadvantage because it is old and consequently it will likely be on the losing end when it comes to getting new links. But then again if the content is still worthwhile and applicable then to some extent it could still get links to it. Coming now to anchor text, the patent application Unique Words, Bigrams, and Phrases in Anchor Text are huge factors in shaping rank. This means that if links build up, they would differ as to how website owners link to a document. Some of them would use the document’s URL to embed the link, some others would use “Blog This” link from Google’s blog site Blogger to get the page title among so many other ways to link a document.
BETTER CLICK-THRU RATIOS AFFECT GOOGLE SEO:
One last big entry in the application document is the ‘clickthrough’ statistics that Google determines from their search engine results that allocate sites higher rankings if they get major ‘clickthrough’ ratios from the Google Search Engine Results Page. The document states that Google has the means check the number of times that a site is clicked through from the search results page and even the amount of time that site visitors spend looking at the document in the link. This is where Google gets some of the data on the way a page is ranked. With all the intriguing items illustrated in the patent application paper, I think it would be a lot more exciting to pick up the people’s feedbacks to the content of the document. So get ready to hit the forums and find out what the people have to say.
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