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Google's Site Ranking Secrets
vivin writes "Ever wonder how Google's site ranking works? Wonder no more. Google recently filed United States Patent Application 20050071741 on March 31, 2005. This patent reveals a great deal of information about Google's site ranking algorithm and makes very good reading. For example, one of the criteria that they use is the number of years that your site has been registered. If your site has been registered for less than a year, then it counts against you. A site registered for a longer period of time means that the owner is probably serious about the site, and the site is probably legitimate. Google's Site Ranking algorithms reveal how hard they are making it for spam sites to get listed (on Google). This information will also make it easier for you to make sure that you get listed well in Google."
The article dedicates only a couple of paragraphs to PageRank, the main algorithm that Google uses, and about 2.5 pages to the rest. If anyone wants to know more about PageRank, here's Page and Brin's original paper: http://www-db.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html
I hate the one hundred and twenty character limit for signatures with an all-enveloping, all-destroying, incredible pass
Each claim in the patent can be invalidated independantly. Most patents start off with an all encompasing claim 1 that would almost certainly get invalidated if it went to court, and define subsequent claims more narrowly, often in terms of the preceding claims.
one of the criteria that they use is the number of years that your site has been registered
is not the same thing as (from the article):
How many years did you register your domain name for?
Though the summary suggests that older sites do better, the article is stating that, in order to improve one's Google ranking, domain owners should purchase longer domain registrations.
And another small note... Initially, we have used an HTTP 403 (Permanently moved) from interakt.ro to interaktonline.com. This caused us a MASSIVE degradation of our position, so right now we just do a transparent redirect from interakt.ro to interaktonline.com, without the Permanently moved headers (and this is how we've reached page 2...)
Alexandru
They are scaper sites.
They get to the top through link spamming, 302 hijacks, "scaping" content from other sites, search engine optimisation etc etc etc.
They are sites "made for adsense" as its called, whereby they exist for the sole purpose to be highly ranked in google and get ad clicks from people looking for something else. Effectively 'doorway' pages, which make a shitload of money, as people that land on such pages don't find what they really want, so click through on the ads in hopes of finding it there instead.
The crap of the internet, many hundreds of thousands of such sites run by only a hanful of thousand very rich people.
I.O.U One Sig.
The story is so old I can't believe it made it to slashdot.
Some more on info the subject:
1. U.S. Patent Application - it's best to read what's exactly been patented.
2. interesting discussion on webmasterworld
Personally I think that while some of the stuff is interesting, most of it is made up rather to confuse SEOs (google doesn't quite like them, you know that, right?). Before that, they had couple factors to think about and work on. Now, there's a shitload of stuff that just makes their work harder. Also, more factors influencing SERPS means it's much, much harder to make a trial-an-error research on what works well and what doesn't.
Just look at the patent application yourself.
I haven't read the whole thing, but just having taken a quick look at it, I have to agree with the posters who said that Google purposefully tried to cover any conceivable technique to index and rank pages. The application discusses multiple implementations of the various techniques that could be used to rank a page. Therefore analysis of the patent application is probably of limited utility for those trying to game PageRank (which was certainly a factor that Google's very competent IP lawyers considered before prosecuting the patent).
For those who are worried that Google is doing evil with this patent application, given the breadth of the patent and the fact that it discusses a plethora of techniques which Google may or may not be using, I will be surprised to see Google try to use this patent (or be able to use this patent) to push another search engine out of the market. More likely, I think, is that this will constitute prior art to enable Google to withstand challenges from other patent applicants for infringement. Of course, if you know anything about PageRank, you know that it was getting published in Scientific American long before Google was the dominant search engine. So this patent application is probably more to prevent allegations that Google infringed by adding on all the other checks and balances to the original PageRank technology to discourage spam sites.
Moiche
I guess it will not help, since links from slashdot have the rel="nofollow" that make them not valid for ranking. This helps minimize the comentary spam bots that run arround the net. My site was hit ny one of those, two or three times.
[]'s Victor Bogado da Silva Lins
^[:wq
I posted a binary for mod_proxy_html at my site along with a how to on compiling it and was listed on Google's front page (currently number 5) within a week. It was a small project that a major aerospace company needed. They actually found my page through Google before we notified them it was there by e-mail.
Submitting the site to Google is a negative in their algorithm. Back when I had therabbithole.redback.inficad.com for my domain name Google found my site within a month.
You can't be successful in a vacuum. If you can't afford advertising and actually have a good site, then you join newsgroups and forums related to your site and become an active productive member. That's how my site got big initially. I linked to it in my sig on a major forum that I was active on.
Five years later I have a very large very diverse web-site and anything I post on it gets indexed (sometimes very highly) within a week. I'm currently one of the top results for Numa Numa Lyrics and Saaya Irie. It took less than a week for even Yahoo to put it at the number one result for the latter. It's since dropped a notch.
I think if you actually ran a site, you'd have a much better outlook on how Google and other major search engines operate. You don't have to spam anybody to get hits. You have to be proactive and useful. Oh yes, and patient.
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