Google Reveals Ranking Components in Patent Application!
Have you ever played the game Clue where you run around a mansion and try to collect information to figure out who killed Mr. Body? Well, optimizing a site for Google is a lot like that game. SEO's collect clues, try to put two-and-two together, throw in some educated guesses and ...voila! ...it was Ms. Scarlet in the Conservatory with the Candle Stick! Or, in the case of search engine optimization, they win the game as they watch their site's SE ranking rise.
With Google's recently released Patent Application we've been handed an enormous clue as to what goes on behind the closed doors at Google. Mind you, this document does not provide answers, but it does point us in the direction of what Google can do and what they are considering doing in the future.
Let's take a closer look at the clues and see what we can find...
The patent, titled Information Retrieval Based on Historical Data, was authored by several Google engineers and originally filed December 31, 2003. Now, over a year later, the patent has finally been published and offers several clues regarding how Google ranks pages, what Google considers to be spam, and how they go about detecting that spam.
While most of what is covered is not particularly surprising, it does help confirm a lot of what was previously educated-speculation. The real questions are, how many of these ideas are actually being used at Google? ...and, if not in current use, will they be used in the future? ...and when?
Though we seriously doubt Google employs all of the proprietary methods they list in the document, the patent still covers a huge number of techniques they could use (or are reserving the right...
