Google's Patent - Information Retrieval Based on Historical Data

[Vishal]

Overview of the 5 Most Critical Concepts from this Paper

These 5 concepts are what I believe to be the most ground-breaking and important for search engine optimization professionals to understand in order to best conduct their work.

1. Google's Concept of "Document Inception"

The date of "document inception", which can refer to either a website as a whole or a single page is used in many different areas by Google. This data can come from the registration info, the date Google first found a link to the site/page or the site/page itself. Google will be using this data to rank documents and establish credibility and relevance.

2. How Changing Content can Affect Rankings

Changing content over time has a huge impact in Google's measures according to this patent. They use changes to determine "freshness" or "staleness" of websites and pages and how that data impacts the value of the links on the page as well its rankings. They'll also measure large, "real", content changes vs. superfluous changes and rank based on that data.

Google also says that for some types of queries, particular results are more valuable - stale results may be desirable for information that doesn't need updating, fresh content is good for results that require it, seasonal results may pop up or down in the rankings based on the time of month/year, etc.

3. Spam Detection & Punishment

Google is employing many new systems of spam detection and prevention according to the patent. These include:

• Watching for sites that rise in the rankings too quickly
• Watching for registration information, IP addresses, name servers, hosts, etc that are on their "bad list"
• Growth of off-topic links
• Speed of link gain
• Percentage of similar anchor text
• Topic/Subject shifts or additions

4. What Google is Attempting to Measure

Google wants to measure or is attempting to actively measure each of the following:

* Domain information

• Registration date
• Length of renewal (10 years, 5 years, 1 year, etc)
• Addresses and Names of admin & technical contacts
• DNS Records
• Address of Name Servers
• Hosting Location & Company
• Stability of this data

* Information on User Behavior Online

• CTR (Click-Through Rate) of individual results in the SERPs
• Length of time spent on a given site/page

* Data contained on your computer

• Favorites/Bookmarks List
• Cache & Temp Files
• Frequency of visits to particular sites/pages (history)

5. The Impact of this Patent

I believe that this patent will help to verify most of the theories surrounding Google's rankings. There has been speculation over the past 18-24 months on nearly every subject covered in this patent at the major SEO forums, but this will serve as verification.

[ChrisB]

Hi Vishal,

Thanks for such a usefull information

[Vishal]

Your welcome ChrisB