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February 26, 2010
Google Insights Tutorial SEO Search Engine optimisation
If you hadn’t heard the reports, Google is getting their search algorithm patented. The US Patent and Trademark Office Application document contains a lot of issues that would be important to those doing SEO analysis. For instance, link spamming was argued quite extensively in the application. The United States Patent Application (#0050071741) has set broad restrictions on rampant link building which I support because of the prevalence of Linking Psychosis.
PART OF MY SEO ANALYSIS OF GOOGLE’S ALGORITHM:
But what doesn’t sit well with me is the way they assign the value of web pages by by putting premium on its popularity over time. I don’t believe in the notion that popularity should be perceived as having a higher significance but this seems to be what the document say.
One more interesting component in the application is how they will rank a website resting on which categories of advertisements appear on your site. Thus, 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 highly popular businesses place ads on their pages. But the question is that lets say you have specific products or services for sale on your website, would you run an Amazon ad for the same products or services just to get high ranking? Why would anyone go promoting the competitor’s products or services just to rank higher on search engines? Now, It will be interesting to see how Google will select the online business who will give the increase in rankings to the websites where their ads appear in. To me this is another case of ascribing more merit to being huge and well-known rather than putting more value on the attribute and importance of a website. The application also speaks of past figures in relation to a website ranking in a particular period of time, highlighting how its popularity rapidly increases in terms of website visitors whenever there is a news coverage about the said website and how it basically modifies its rankings.
One more component that is worth mentioning is determining 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 boundaries of user privacy. Would you allow Google to look 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 take note your browser’s cache files as a means of knowing the value of a website. The document also suggests that search engines will observe cookies to see the shifting interest (could be upward or downward) of a particular document. This could also challenge the boundaries of privacy as well. The application document ,in addition, has an entry on imposing additional penalties on recently built websites by giving them mediocre standing for a long period of time. For algorithms that are not readily detected 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 argument, then it becomes advantageous to simply expand the term of your domain name registrations given that it will award improved rankings. If approved, this will also change the domain name business given that domain name registrations will become an influential component 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. Do we see the selling of domain names as becoming a profitable business? We’ll see over time if that happens.
THOSE STARTING TO LEARN SEO SHOULD KEEP THIS IN MIND:
The patent application paper also includes that it will be imposing penalties to sites that are associated with ‘illegitimate’ domains. I hope they find a method to establish if the links are from competitors that desire to discredit a site by deliberately linking the competitors’ sites to ‘illegitimate’ domains. With all this buzz about links associated with better 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 valuable and relevant 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 accumulate, 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 CLICKTHROUGH RATIOS AFFECT GOOGLE SEO:
One last major entry in the application document is the ‘clickthrough’ information that Google determines from their search engine results that give 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 selected from the search results page and even 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 intriguing items illustrated in the patent application paper, I imagine it would be a lot more exciting to find out the people’s feedbacks to the content of the document. So get ready to hit the forums and see what the people have to say.
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