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."

Comments

Note

[Leffe]

Note that there is no guarantee that Google uses everything in the patent or that they don't use other methods not described in any of their other patents.

Re:Note

[iminplaya]

Then what is the point in patenting the method if they aren't going to use it?

Uhhh...to prevent others from benefiting from it? That's what patents are for. They say it there to promote innovation. It protects the owners exclusive control in the hope that he might reveal his idea to the world. More often than not, what really happens is that the owner will put the invention on the shelf because a)it competes with other inventions the owner may have on the market, or b)like a land or commodities speculator, he's holding out for an exorbitant price. Note that also more often than not, the owner of the IP privileges is not the creator. Patents are bought and sold like poker chips. While the actual device rots. Only the paper pushers benefit.

what are they trying to protect then?

Their advantage over everybody else.

or

[lostpixel.]

or conversely how spam website can get higher :)

Speed of gaining links?

[dhasenan]

'Google record the discovery of a link and link changes over time. The speed at which a site gains links and the link life span.' I fail to see how this would be helpful--if something's new and briefly popular, you only want to give it a high rank for a brief period and forget it once people stop linking. But if something's new and popular for a duration, you want to keep it well ranked.

Re:Speed of gaining links?

[Peeteriz]

If you have a good site with valuable information, then, over time, news of it will get around, and you will keep getting new links over time.

However, if you have gotten 1000 links at once, and for the next months noone else is linking to you - then you have probably bought the initial links, but nobody real considers the content worthy of attention.

Its a patent... and a laundry list...

[shri]

They've thrown every technique they could have thought of into the patent purely as a defensive mechanism to prevent other major engines from patenting them. Some of the techniques are thrown in as defensive FUD to prevent newbies from using them.

Some of these techniques are just plain old bizzare and might be way too difficult to approach algorithmically.

Oh well .. what do I know ..

SEOs make me barf

[Anonymous Coward]

Argh... quit trying to game the system! If you read the article, it's entirely from the perspective of someone trying to corrupt the rankings for financial gain. Here's an idea: make good, useful web pages, rather then spending all your time an energy creating these BS link farms. The SEO world is the modern day equivilent of snake-oil salesmen.

About the autor

[nietsch]

bout the Author
How-to-make-money-online.info is a site focused on Making Money Online and Internet Marketing, listing the many and varied ways of making money online. Featuring, resources, thousands of Internet Marketing articles and useful links.

This article comes with reprint rights. You are free to reprint and distribute it as you like. All that we ask is that you do not make any changes, that this resource text is include, and that the link above is intact.

So that explains a lot. What a crappy article, I wonder if the submitter is the same as the Author?

Re:Spammers killing Google

[Pig Hogger]

Could someone explain how other crap search engines are getting high rankings in Google search?

That's not as bad as getting mailing list archives. You search for a particular Linux error message, and what you get is archives of mailing list messages of guys who ask precisely the same question, with a lot of "me too" follow-ups, but no definite answer to your problem, that is if you can manage to find the link that leads to the follow-ups... Because heaven forbids mailing list archive software offers standardized navigation...

Not that simple

[Darkman, Walkin Dude]

No, its not that simple. Lets say I have a small business, I sell garden tools, lawnmowers,etc, in a certain region. And yet I do a search on google for garden tools + region, I am nowhere to be found. What do I do? I optimise the hell out of my site, caking it with region name + garden tools information, and I set up a links exchange program, getting in links left right and centre from related sites. This is SEO, and it will only affect people that enter a search for "garden" "tools" "my region". In other words, those that actually want to find my site.

Theres a distinction between SEO and spamming; if I was to optimise for a garden tools site and set up a poker site there, that would be spamming.

Re:Not that simple

[Shaper_pmp]

I hate SEO with a passion (and I have to do it as part of my job), but you're right.

The way I see it, SEO is a tool - nothing more, nothing less. It isn't inherently evil or inherently good - it's how you use it and what you use it for that matters.

If you've got a good site on... i dunno... aardvark polishing for fun and profit, then you should rank highly on Google. If you don't rank well on Google, it's probably because your site is lacking one of fame, content or clean code. All of these are necessary for (or inevitable side-products of) a good site that does what people want.

Conversely, a good site will probably have many inbound links, clean semantic markup, well-focused pages full of good content and so on. This is simply good site design (or, like the links, a side-effect of it), but it's also the very ethical end of the SEO spectrum.

Now, you also get evil scumbag fuckwits-for-hire who specialise in link-farming, keyword stuffing, cloaking and other black-hat techniques, and sell their services to shitty pr0n or spam sites. This is spam - no doubt about it - but it only represents the black-hat side of SEO.

The black-hat SEOers, it must be admitted, are the one which gets all the attention. They're the ones advertising like mad, making overblown claims, spamming search engines with crap listings and generally getting in people's faces. However, just because these people use SEO doesn't make SEO bad. Before SEO they were likely sending e-mail spams until that got too hard, but you don't unilaterally brand professionally-looking e-mails or people who sell mailing-list managers as evil, do you?

As Google et al. get their acts in gear and revamp their algorithms, "SEO" is increasingly overlapping with "good site design" - this was always the intention, and even now "white-hat SEO" and "good site design" are pretty much synonymous.

SEO isn't the problem - the problem is a combination of shithead black-hat SEOers, Search Engines inadequately assessing a page's worth and ill-educated types who shortsightedly blame the gun or bullet instead of the guy who fired it at them.

I find this quote funny:

[slappyjack]

There's a lot to take onboard here and consider. But you can't go far wrong with your SEO if you try to grow your site as organically as possible.

If any of you have worked in a small online shops you know what a fucking holy war this is between marketing and pretty much everyone else. I specifically remember saying at one point, "Do we have to make ALL of the money RIGHT NOW?"

Good for Google for coming forward and telling peole they won't be a part of that slimy shit.

Bad for Google for saying all of this to drive up prices on their AdWord sales.