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If you hadn’t heard the rumors, Google is having their search algorithm patented. The US Patent and Trademark Office Application document contains a lot of things that would be significant to those learning SEO. For example, link spamming was discussed pretty broadly in the application. The United States Patent Application (#0050071741) has set broad boundaries on rampant link building which I support ever since 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 attribute the significance of web pages by by putting premium on its popularity over time. I don’t believe in the perspective that popularity ought to be perceived as having a higher significance but this seems to be what the say.

ADVERTISING EXHIBITED ON YOUR WEBSITE IMPACTS ONES RANK AS WELL

One more intriguing component in the application is the manner in which they will rank a website depending on the categories of advertisements are found on your site. So, if a very popular advertiser like Amazon ran an ad on your page, then your website will be ranked highly. This is a huge bonus for websites that get to have highly popular companies place ads on their pages. But the question is that lets say you have specific products or services available for purchase on your website, can you run an Amazon advert for the similar products or services in order to receive higher ranking? Why would anyone promote  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 higher rankings to the websites where their ads appear in. For me this is another case of giving additional value to being large and well-known rather than looking into the attribute and importance of a website. The document as well talks about past records in relation to a website ranking in a certain period of time, highlighting how its popularity all of a sudden surges specially when it comes to website traffic whenever the website is 0 and how it subsequently alters its rankings.

One more element that is worth mentioning is determining the importance of pages based on user maintained and generated data that looks through your browser’s bookmarks and favorites. Now that makes me wonder if this algorithm aspect is within the boundaries of user privacy. Would you permit Google to look into your computer and see what sites you have bookmarked and saved in your ‘favorites’ folder?

CAN THE AGE OF A DOMAIN AFFECT GOOGLE SEO?

Furthermore, Google will also take note your browser’s cache files as a method of calculating the value of a website. The document also mentions that search engines will observe cookies to learn of the changing fascination (could be upward or downward) of a particular document. This could also challenge the boundaries of privacy as well. The application document also has provisions on imposing additional penalties on recently built websites by giving them inferior standing for a long 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 rationale, then it becomes crucial to simply lengthen the term of your domain name registrations given that it will give better ratings. If approved, this will also change the domain name business since domain name registrations will become a valuable element 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 profitable business? We’ll see over time if that happens.

INDIVIDUALS COMMENCING TO MASTER SEO NEED TO KEEP THIS IN MIND:

The patent application paper also inserts that it will be imposing penalties to sites that are linked to ‘illegitimate’ domains. I hope they discover a technique to establish if the links are from competitors that desire to discredit a site by intentionally linking the competitors’ sites to ‘illegitimate’ domains. With all the talk about links associated with quality page rankings, it appears that older content will suffer a lot because it is old and as a result it will likely be on the losing end with regards to getting new links. However if the content is still useful 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 determining 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.

SUPERIOR CLICK-THRU RATIOS AFFECT GOOGLE SEO:

One last significant entry in the application document is the ‘clickthrough’ information that Google determines from their search engine results that allocate sites higher rankings if they get high ‘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 including 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 how a page is ranked. With all the interesting things mentioned in the patent application document, I suppose it would be a lot more fascinating to listen to the people’s feedbacks to the content of the document. So get ready to hit the forums and look into what the people have to say.

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Tags: Internet Marketing, page-rank, ranking, search algorithm