Google Patent Specification Part 2

Fighting Spam and Artificial Link Building

Google's US patent filing of March 31/05 provides seo's and webmasters valuable insight into Google's tightly guarded search intelligence, and demonstrates conclusively that Google's information retrieval is based on historical data.

The question now is what do these changes mean to you and your rankings...

Welcome to part two in our series about the new Google patent specification and what it means to the ranking of your website.

Credibility and Online Reputation

Google has raised the bar once again in their on going efforts to discourage search engine spam and artificial link inflation, with the filing of a United States Patent Application 20050071741 on March 31, 2005.

Now, having defined their patent abstract as follows, it is clear that your online credibility and reputation is being scrutinized by the Big G...

"A system identifies a document and obtains one or more types of history data associated with the document. The system may generate a score for the document based, at least in part, on the one or more types of history data."

How Google Scores your Web Pages

In addition to web page content, the ranking of web pages is influenced by the frequency of page or site updates. Google measures content changes to determine how 'fresh' or how 'stale' a web page is. Google then tries to distinguish between real and superfluous content changes.

This means that it's not always advisable to change the content of your web pages. According to Google, stale results may be desirable for information that doesn't need updating while some forms of content must be update regularly in order to remain valid. For example, seasonal results might go up and down in the result pages based on the time of the year.

In other words, Google is looking for 'natural updating' of content, not spam style updates in an effort to improve position on targeted keywords.

Web Page Updates and Google Rankings

These new patent specifications reveal much about how Google may use your web page updates as a determining factor in the ranking of your web pages in Google serps. Unfortunately, it doesn't prioritize or confirm any specific method currently being used by Google.

According to their patent, Google records and scores the following web page changes in order to determine web page freshness:

• Frequency of content changes
• Depth of changes made (substantial, redundant, superfluous)
• Changes in keyword density and distribution (proximity)
• Changes in the number of inbound links pointing to a particular web page
• Changes in anchor texts (the actual text that is the the link to a web page)
• Number of links to low trust web sites or sites of questionable nature (affiliate sites, sites with little or duplicate content, bad neighborhoods, etc)
• Changes in out going links to authority sites

It is quite conceivable, that Google would include the results of this analysis in the ranking of a web page. What's really interesting is what Google takes into account when determining the 'freshness' of a web page. For example, if a stale page continues to procure incoming links, it will still be considered fresh, even if the page header hasn't changed and the content is not updated.

Google and your Website Rankings

There are a number of conclusions that can easily be drawn from the Google patent information presented above, particularly when updating or adding new web pages to your website and linking to others.

As indicated, keep your updates as natural and possible. Content that requires fresh search results lends itself nicely to frequent updates, while unnecessary or superfluous changes can do you more harm than good.

Beware of sudden changes in theme or keyword densities. This can be an indication of agressive on-page optimization in an attempt to affect search engine rankings for certain keyword targets. If you must change your keywords, use lateral keywords and terms to support your original theme as much as possible.

Vary anchor text use for inbound links, and avoid rapid link acquisition (particularly for new or recently updated pages).

Avoid linking to website that are 'low trust' or questionable, including those connected to 'bad neighborhoods' and those consisting of mostly duplicate content.

Limit affiliate links on new web pages, and use caution when linking to pages that contain multiple affiliate links.

Read the next in our series of articles about Google's patent specifications and what it means for your website rankings, Search Engine Spam and the Google Sandbox Effect.

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