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If you hadn’t heard the reports, Google is having their search algorithm patented. The US Patent and Trademark Office Application document discusses a lot of things that would be significant to those doing Google SEO. For example, link spamming was discussed fairly extensively in the application. The United States Patent Application (#0050071741) has set comprehensive limitations on aggressive link building which I support ever since 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 merit of web pages by by putting premium on its popularity over time. I don’t believe in the perspective that being more popular should be taken as having a higher importance but this seems to be what the expresses.

Another interesting component in the application is how they will rank a website depending on which kinds of advertisements are found on your site. Therefore, if a big advertiser like Amazon placed an ad on your page, then this will get high ranking for your website. This is a huge bonus for websites that get to have high-profile corporate names place ads on their pages. But the question is that what if you have certain 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 rank higher on search engines? Now, It will be interesting to see how Google will choose the online firms who will provide the higher rankings to the websites where their ads are displayed. To me this is simply ascribing additional merit to being large and well-known rather than looking into the feature and relevance of a website. The paper as well talks about earlier information related to a website ranking in a given period of time, highlighting how its popularity rapidly surges in terms of website traffic every time there is a news coverage about the said website and how it basically changes its rankings.

One more 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 question if this algorithm element is within the limits 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?

In addition, Google will also take note your browser’s cache files as a method of calculating the value of a website. The application also suggests that search engines will monitor cookies to see the shifting interest (could be upward or downward) of a particular document. This could also be against the limits of privacy as well. The application document ,in addition, has provisions on applying further penalties on up and coming websites by giving them mediocre ratings over 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 case, then it becomes advantageous to merely lengthen the term of your domain name registrations and it will guarantee you of better ratings than those who have registered for a shorter period.. If approved, this will also change the domain name business since domain name registrations will become a valuable factor in a regulating a website’s ranking. This proposal possibly will result in domain names being be bought and sold rather than leaving them to expire at the end of their registration periods. Do we see the selling of domain names as becoming a profitable business? We’ll find out over time if that happens.

THOSE STARTING TO LEARN SEO SHOULD KEEP THIS IN MIND:

The document also includes that it will be penalizing sites that are connected to ‘illegitimate’ domains. I hope they discover a method to ascertain if the links are from competitors that want to destroy a site by intentionally linking the competitors’ sites to ‘illegitimate’ domains. With all the talk about links associated with better page rankings, it looks like 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. But then again if the content is still worthwhile and pertinent 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 CLICKTHROUGH RATIOS AFFECT GOOGLE SEO:

One last big item in the application document is the ‘clickthrough’ statistics that Google determines from their search engine results that give 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 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 how a page is ranked. With all the interesting things illustrated in the patent application paper, I sense it would be a lot more exciting to listen to the people’s reactions 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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