Have you read Google’s application for a patent on their search algorithm?. The US Patent and Trademark Office Application document contains a lot of issues that would be significant to those learning SEO. For instance, link spamming was considered rather extensively in the application. The United States Patent Application (#0050071741) has set all-encompassing restrictions on rampant link building which I support ever since of the prevalence of Linking Psychosis.
HERE’S SOME OF MY SEO ANALYSIS OF GOOGLE’S ALGORITHM:
But what I don’t agree entirely is the manner in which they assign the significance of web pages by how popular it gets. I don’t believe in the idea that being more popular should be taken as having a superior significance but this appears to be what the document expresses.
ADVERTISING DISPLAYED ON YOUR WEB PAGE AFFECTS YOUR RANK AS WELL
One more fascinating item in the application is the way they will rank a website based on which varieties of advertisements appear on your site. So, if a well-known advertiser like Amazon placed an ad on your page, then this will get high ranking for your website. This is surely a welcome development for websites that get to have very famous companies place ads on their pages. But the odd thing is that what if you have certain services or products available in your website, can you run an Amazon advert for the same services or products just to receive higher rank? Can you imagine promoting the competitor’s products or services just to get high rankings on search engines? Now, It will be interesting to see how Google will select the companies who will provide the increase in rankings to the websites where their ads are displayed. For me this is simply ascribing extra value to being big and famous rather than putting more value on the feature and importance of a website. The application as well talks about previous facts in relation to a website ranking in a particular point of time, highlighting how its reputation all of a sudden surges in terms of website traffic whenever there is a news coverage about the said website and how it subsequently alters its rankings.
Another element that is worth mentioning is assigning the value of pages based on user maintained and generated data that scans through your browser’s bookmarks and favorites. Now that makes me wonder if this algorithm aspect is within the limits of user privacy. Would you allow Google to crawl into your computer and find out what sites you have bookmarked and placed 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 means of assigning the value of a website. The paper also mentions that search engines will keep an eye on cookies to see the changing attraction (could be upward or downward) of a particular web page. This could also be against the boundaries of privacy as well. The application document ,in addition, has an entry on imposing further penalties on up and coming websites by assigning them inferior standing over a prolonged period of time. For algorithms that are not seen and for long term purchases of domain names, the application document express 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 case, then it becomes crucial to merely extend the lifetime of your domain name registrations and it will guarantee you of improved ratings than those who have registered for a shorter period.. If approved, this will also change the domain name market since domain name registrations will become an important component in a determining a website’s ranking. This proposition possibly will result in domain names being be bought and sold rather than being left to expire at the end of their registration periods. Do we see the selling of domain names as becoming a lucrative business? We’ll see over time if that happens.
INDIVIDUALS BEGINNING TO UNDERSTAND SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION SHOULD KEEP THIS IN MIND:
The document also includes that it will be imposing penalties to sites that are linked to ‘illegitimate’ domains. I hope they find a method to establish if the links are from competitors that desire to destroy a site by deliberately linking the competitors’ sites to ‘illegitimate’ domains. With all this buzz about links associated with superior page rankings, it appears that older content will suffer a lot because it is old and consequently it will possibly be on the losing end with regards to getting new links. But then again if the content is still worthwhile and relevant then to some extent it could still get links to it. In the case of anchor text, the patent application Unique Words, Bigrams, and Phrases in Anchor Text are crucial factors in shaping rank. This means that if links build up, they would vary 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.
HIGHER CLICKTHROUGH RATIOS AFFECT GOOGLE SEO:
One last major item in the application document is the ‘clickthrough’ information that Google determines from their search engine results that allocate sites higher rankings if they get superior ‘clickthrough’ ratios from the Google Search Engine Results Page. The document states that Google can check the number of times that a site is clicked through from the search results page including the amount of time that users 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 interesting things mentioned in the patent application paper, I imagine it would be a lot more exciting to hear 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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