Have any of you read Google’s application for a patent on their search algorithm?. The US Patent and Trademark Office Application document discusses a lot of issues that would be important to a lot of website owners. For example, link spamming was considered pretty extensively in the application. The United States Patent Application (#0050071741) has set all-encompassing boundaries on aggressive link building which I support because of the advent of Linking Psychosis.

PART OF MY SEO ANALYSIS OF GOOGLE’S ALGORITHM:

But what doesn’t sit well with me is the way they attribute the importance of web pages by how popular it gets. I don’t agree with this notion that being more popular should be seen as having a superior importance but this seems to be what the asserts.

One more fascinating entry in the application is the manner in which they will rank a website depending on the kinds of advertisements appear on your site. So, if a well-known advertiser like Amazon ran an ad on your page, then your website will be ranked highly. This is surely a welcome development for websites that get to have very famous businesses place ads on their pages. But the question is that what if 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? Have you imagine promoting the competitor’s products or services just to get high rankings on search engines? Come to think of it, I wonder how Google will choose the online business who will give the higher rankings to the websites where their ads are displayed. To me this is simply ascribing additional value to being huge and famous rather than looking into the attribute and importance of a website. The application also speaks of previous records related to a website ranking in a given point of time, underscoring how its popularity all of a sudden surges specially when it comes to website traffic every time the website is 0 and the way it basically modifies its rankings.

One more element that is worth mentioning is assigning the importance 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 see 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 calculating the value of a website. The paper also states that search engines will examine cookies to see the changing interest (could be upward or downward) of a particular web page. This could also invade the boundaries of privacy as well. The application document also has an entry on imposing further penalties on up and coming websites by giving them pitiable standing for a prolonged period of time. For algorithms that are not readily detected and for long term purchases of domain names, the application document state 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 would be crucial to basically extend the lifetime of your domain name registrations given that it will bestow better rankings. If approved, this will also change the domain name business since domain name registrations will become an influential component in a regulating a website’s ranking. This application could result in domain names being be maintained and marketed rather than being left to expire at the end of their registration periods. Are we looking at selling of domain names as becoming a profitable business? We’ll find out over time if that happens.

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The patent application also adds that it will be penalizing sites that are associated with ‘illegitimate’ domains. I hope they discover a technique to determine if the links are from competitors that intend to destroy a site by purposely linking the competitors’ sites to ‘illegitimate’ domains. With all the talk about links connected to better page rankings, it appears that older content will be at a disadvantage because it is not new 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 crucial factors in shaping 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 allocate sites higher rankings if they get superior ‘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 how Google gets some of the data on how a page is ranked. With all the intriguing items mentioned in the patent application paper, I sense 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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