An article by Mike Banks Valentine outlines interesting points in Google’s patent on their ranking algorithm that was posted on March 31st at the US Patent Office.
He notes that:
“it seems to be PageRank redefined with a few variations to limit link spamming and reduce stale results, along with multiple innovative elements not previously considered.”
Some of the (stranger) points worth noting are.
- Older pages that get more inbound links will benefit: The algo would appear to limit the perceived value of a page unless it becomes wildly popular over time.
- Do you have advertisers on your site?: Google will rank a site based on the advertiser choosing to advertise on a particular site. That might be an indication of how valuable a site is to users and visitors.
- Press releases, forum postings, citations matter: As a further measure to differentiate a document related to a topical phenomenon from a spam document, they may consider mentions of the document in news articles, discussion groups, etc. on the theory that spam documents will not be mentioned, for example, in the news.
- Is your site bookmarked or in your user’s list of favourites?: They also plan to determine the value of pages based on "user maintained/generated data" - read that "bookmarks" and "favorites lists" built into your browser.
- How often do users access your site: Further, they reference user's browser cache files as a method of determining value of a site. For example, the "temp" or cache files associated with users could be monitored by search engine to identify whether there is an increase or decrease in a document being added over time.
- More time in the sandbox: It appears to apply further penalties to new sites by keeping them poorly ranked for even longer periods
- Longer domain registrations are better: Applies an apparently new item to algorithms of long term purchase of domain names and historical data related to IP address and hosting company. 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.
- Variations in anchor text are preferred: Unique Words, Bigrams, Phrases in Anchor Text are significant in determining rank, because if natural links develop, they would vary when webmasters link to a document differently.
- Clickthroughs in Google’s SERPs matter: Sites that get significant clickthrough rates from the Google SERPs will rank higher.
All in all, it seems to be that Google is trying to make its algorithm simulate the way a human would access a relevant document.
Bookmarks, user cache, domain registration period, higher clickthroughs… are all steps in the direction of weeding out spammy pages and giving higher rankings to sites that users view as having better quality content.
Read the complete article here: Google Search Algorithm Patent Application Creates Spring Buzz!
# posted by Priya Shah @ 8:45 AM
