Thursday, January 17, 2008

New Google Patent & Quality Guidelines

As we all know in this era of Internet Technology Google is God among all the Search Engines. This is just because the Quality of information that they brought in front of you by use of their smart Algorithm and Out of box strategies they implemented to produce same.

Google keep on refining at their approaches to manipulate Search engine rankings to provide best possible results as per user queries..Recently new Google patent and Quality guidelines have been announced and with positive hope that they are going to implement same soon....

Here is detailed scenario what new Google Engine may stress upon:

1. Exemplary Search Engine:The Search Engines strive to provide high quality results for a search query. There are several factors that may affect the quality of the results generated by a search engine. For example, some web site producers use spamming techniques to artificially inflate their rank. Also, “stale” documents (i.e., those documents that have not been updated for a period of time and, thus, contain stale data) may be ranked higher than “fresher” documents (i.e., those documents that have been more recently updated and, thus, contain more recent data). In some particular contexts, the higher ranking stale documents degrade the search results. Thus, there remains a need to improve the quality of results generated by search engines.

2. Document Inception Date:According to another implementation, the date that a domain with which a document is registered may be used as an indication of the inception date of the document. It may be assumed that a document with a fairly recent inception date will not have a significant number of links from other documents (i.e., back links). For existing link-based scoring techniques that score based on the number of links to/from a document, this recent document may be scored lower than an older document that has a larger number of links (e.g., back links). Here we must also note that NEW Domains might have certain advantages from old domains. Consider the example of a document with an inception date of yesterday that is referenced by 10 back links. This document may be scored higher by search engine than a document with an inception date of 10 years ago that is referenced by 100 back links because the rate of link growth for the former is relatively higher than the latter. While a spiky rate of growth in the number of back links may be a factor used by search engine to score documents, it may also signal an attempt to spam search engine. Accordingly, in this situation, search engine may actually lower the score of a document(s) to reduce the effect of spamming.

3. Content Updates/Changes:A document whose content is edited often may be scored differently than a document whose content remains static over time. Factors, such as the number of “new” or unique pages associated with a document over a period of time … the ratio of the number of new or unique pages associated with a document over a period of time versus the total number of pages associated with that document. The amount that the document is updated over one or more periods of time. For instance, content deemed to be unimportant if updated/changed, such as JavaScript, comments, advertisements, navigational elements or date/time tags, may be given relatively little weight or even ignored altogether when determining UA.On the other hand, content deemed to be important if updated/changed such as the title or anchor text associated with the forward links, could be given more weight than changes to other content when determining UA. (UA: User Agent - Usually a Web browser, but may be any means of reading and or interpreting a Web Page.). Documents for which there is an increase in the rate of change might be scored higher than those documents for which there is a steady rate of change, even if that rate of change is relatively high. The amount of change may also be a factor in this scoring.

4. Query Analysis:Another factor is Query Analysis the number of results pages your website is ranked for. Query-based factor may relate to the occurrence of certain search terms appearing in queries over time. A particular set of search terms may increasingly appear in queries over a period of time. For example, terms relating to a “hot” topic that is gaining/has gained popularity or a breaking news event would conceivably appear frequently over a period of time. In this case, search engine may score documents associated with these search terms (or queries) higher than documents not associated with these terms. Another query-based factor may relate to queries that remain relatively constant over time but lead to results that change over time. For example, a query relating to “world series champion” leads to search results that change over time (e.g., documents relating to a particular team dominate search results in a given year or time of year). This change can be monitored and used to score documents accordingly. Yet another query-based factor might relate to the “staleness” of documents returned as search results. The staleness of a document may be based on factors, such as document creation date, anchor growth, traffic, content change, forward/back link growth, etc. For some queries, recent documents are very important.

5. Anchor Text:If the content of a document changes such that it differs significantly from the anchor text associated with its back links, then the domain associated with the document may have changed significantly (completely) from a previous. This may occur when a domain expires and a different party purchases the domain. Because anchor text is often considered to be part of the document to which its associated link points, the domain may show up in search results for queries that are no longer on topic. This is an undesirable result. One way to address this problem is to estimate the date that a domain changed its focus. This may be done by determining a date when the text of a document changes significantly or when the text of the anchor text changes significantly. All links and/or anchor text prior to that date may then be ignored or discounted. The freshness of anchor text may also be used as a factor in scoring documents. The freshness of an anchor text may be determined, for example, by the date of appearance/change of the anchor text. Thus the Anchor text is as always the most important factor which can sometimes damage your site very badly.

6. Traffic:According to an implementation consistent with the principles of the invention, information relating to traffic associated with a document over time may be used to generate a score associated with the document. Now Google may monitor the time-varying characteristics of traffic to, or other “use” of, a document by one or more users. A large reduction in traffic may indicate that a document may be stale. Hence this time Google looks at our traffic.

7. User Behaviour:According to an implementation consistent with the principles of the invention, information corresponding to individual or aggregate user behaviour relating to a document over time may be used to generate (or alter) a score associated with the document. For example, search engine may monitor the number of times that a document is selected from a set of search results and the amount of time one or more users spend accessing the document. If a document is returned for a certain query and over time, or within a given time window, users spend either more or less time on average on the document given the same or similar query, then this may be used as an indication that the document is fresh or stale, respectively.

8. Domain Related Information:Google looks at your WEB HOSTING PROVIDER to see if there is SPAM/PORN/GATEWAY website on the same server and you might get unwillingly punished so please choose your web hosting provider carefully. Also, or alternatively, the age, or other information, regarding a name server associated with a domain may be used to predict the legitimacy of the domain. A “good” name server may have a mix of different domains from different registrars and have a history of hosting those domains, while a “bad” name server might host mainly pornography or doorway domains, domains with commercial words (a common indicator of spam), or primarily bulk.

9. User Maintained/Generated Data:Bookmarking and other user maintained data from the Google Toolbar and Browser partners will help to measure the importance of the page. Search engine may monitor data maintained or generated by a user, such as “bookmarks,” “favourites,” or other types of data that may provide some indication of documents favoured by, or of interest to, the user. Search engine may obtain this data either directly (e.g., via a browser assistant) or indirectly (e.g., via a browser) to determine the importance of the document.

Conclusion:
1. Do not change your Link Text drastically or you can hurt your previous linking efforts.
2. If you’re buying links, make sure you update your website/landing page or at least have good amount of text changed, otherwise you can be caught for spamming.
3. Using some keyword ranking reporting software “can damage your website’s rankings” simply because its not clicking on the website and G will think your website is not “Quality resource”.
4. A new thing with this update is that Your web hosting can really hurt your rankings and that is when there are porn/spam/gateway websites on your web server. This is very harsh to shared hosting accounts as you don’t really know what is on the server besides your website and you can get punished for nothing.

Thanks
SEO & Internet Marketing Specialst

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