Gleaned Insight from Google Patents in 2007

Tedster over at webmasterworld.com made some pretty astute observations of Google’s 2007 patent: Document Scoring Based on Link-Based Criteria.

The post discusses how often certain ‘areas’ of the page, such as footers, switch-out links to better detect paid linking. Many sites have relegated paid linking to footers and other segments of the page that seem natural.

The ambiguity of whether or not a page’s content should be updated on a regular basis is touched on, but is left just as ambiguous as ever. I think it’s common sense: If you have a news page, it should change quite frequently. If you have a statistics page, it should change as often as stats are measured. If you have a resource/reference page, then it should be updated ONLY as often as authoritative information changes.

I’m, personally, delighted to see that ‘partial indexing of pages’ is being given serious focus, if only briefly.

We all know, and have for some time, that the more inter-related terms a page ranks well for gives it better ranking for these terms, across-the-board.

I do, however, find that what is discussed about ranking ceiling, traffic throttling, and the yo-yo effect has some solid basis – as opposed to just giving SERP watchers something to complain about.

Enjoy!

Chat Man

clipped from www.webmasterworld.com Google’s Patent on Backlinks – many interesting clues from 2007 tedster With the current update apparently doing “something different” with backlinks, I went back for another reading of the 2007 patent application Document Scoring Based On Link-Based Criteria PAGE SEGMENTATION and RATES OF CHANGE Not only the back link juice itself is weighted differently, whether it changes is also given a different weight, depending on where the link appears on the page PAGE CHANGES CAN IMPROVE OR LOWER RANKINGS …it all depends on the query terms! PARTIAL INDEXING OF PAGES search engine may store “signatures” of documents instead of the (entire) documents themselves to detect changes to document content. RANKING FOR SEVERAL SEARCHES RANKING CEILINGS, TRAFFIC THROTTLING and the YO-YO EFFECT Google may allow a ranking to grow only at a certain rate, or apply a certain maximum threshold of growth for defined period of time.