Written on April 3rd, 2005 at 02:04 pm by Darren Rowse
Important Google SEO Information
A couple of days ago I mentioned the new Google patent that reveals a lot about the ways Google is now indexing sites. The patent is long and if you don’t know the ins and outs of the technical stuff can be a bit overwhelming - so I’ve been checking out what it all means from a few bloggers and webmasters who have the gift of translating it for dummies like me.
What they are saying is fascinating stuff (I’m shocked more people are not talking about it in the blogging community) - let me give you a few snippets.
Inside Google has these tips worth taking into account:
• PageRank isn’t about the number of links, its about link growth. Sheer volume of links is meaningless, because Google tracks historical link volume data, determining rises and falls in the number of links. If your site earns a steady number of links every month, it may never move up in the rankings, because it is not gaining in popularity. Link building campaigns are one step removed from meaningless, because they can never gain momentum. In a sense, web spam won’t help rankings as much as might be thought, because you cannot infinitely increase the rate of spammage, and the moment it drops off, your site is dead.
• How often you update affects everything. If you update every day, and then start updating once a week, your site is dropping, no two ways about it. In addition, Google keeps a close eye on sites that shoot up quickly, and checks if its spam related or a Slashdotting-type event.
• How long you register your domain name for affects your rankings. There’s a boost for sites registered for longer. How many websites will we see buying 100-year registrations now?
• Google also knows who owns more than one site, because of its registrar data. Linking from one of your own sites to another is useless, because Google knows.
SEOmoz has the most comprehensive commentary on the patent I’ve seen so far:
How Changing Content can Affect Rankings. Changing content over time has a huge impact in Google’s measures according to this patent. They use changes to determine “freshness” or “staleness” of websites and pages and how that data impacts the value of the links on the page as well its rankings. They’ll also measure large, “real”, content changes vs. superfluous changes and rank based on that data.
Spam Detection & Punishment - Google is employing many new systems of spam detection and prevention according to the patent. These include:
• Watching for sites that rise in the rankings too quickly
• Watching for registration information, IP addresses, name servers, hosts, etc that are on their “bad list”
• Growth of off-topic links
• Speed of link gain
• Percentage of similar anchor text
• Topic/Subject shifts or additions
Other discussions on this:
- Information Retrieval Based on Historical Data - Sandbox Explanation, Aging Delay?
- Google’s War on SEO - Documented
- Does New Google Patent Validate Sandbox Theory?
- New Google Patent, Must Read
- Sandbox Explained by Google? “Information retrieval based on historical data
- New Google patent proves “sandbox” exists
10 Responses to “Important Google SEO Information”
Danger Stevens
April 3rd, 2005 5:37 pm
Man, this really makes me want to stop caring about SEO. I’m not sure if that’s Google’s intention, but it’s just too many variables to worry about.
PFJ
April 3rd, 2005 5:52 pm
Linking from one of your sites to another of your own sites is not useless. That is BS. It isn’t given asmuch “weight”.
Darren
April 3rd, 2005 6:26 pm
PFJ - I agree that in my experience its not completely useless - but I’ve noticed that links between my sites are much less powerful than they once were and this is what I suspect they are saying. In the past they were quite powerful - but now they are far less powerful.
Rick Blythe
April 3rd, 2005 11:21 pm
I only use sibling links (as I call them) to inform Google of a new site that needs to be spidered. Anything beyond that I feel is spam and will be regarded as such.
Great post Darren!
marcel
April 4th, 2005 12:05 am
For almost every point mentioned… there is a thershold of abuse…
After x amount of sibling links, your sites will actually be losing relevance - especially your larger sites.
Whatever you do, use common sense and don’t abuse the search engines. If something tells you that what your doing is immoral, you probably are. However, not everyone has morals.
Scrivs
April 4th, 2005 3:50 am
The point of adding links to your sites from your blog isn’t necessarily to boost PR, but to boost natural traffic. You can’t rely on SE traffic since that fluctuates, but Actively promoting your sites other sites is good way to keep traffic consisten. And believe me all those damn PR 6/7 sites on WIN, Inc. aren’t from external sites. I guess now though they will have a tougher time.
Jon
April 4th, 2005 10:39 am
I would have never guessed that length of domain name registration is a factor in page rank. Not sure if that makes any sense or not.
Scrivs
April 4th, 2005 12:35 pm
The only reason the length of domain registration would come into play is it supposedly lets Google know that you are creating a site for the long run instead of a quick spam site. Of course you could be creating a spam site so length of registration just becomes another of the small factors they might use for SE rankings.
Ron Zimmermann
December 12th, 2005 6:16 am
There the a popular forum, run by people claiming to be SEO experts called cre8asite (http://www.cre8asiteforums.com). They have recently changed their forum software from phpbb to invision. The funny thing is, is that their google PR has gone from 5 to zero. And they seem to think it is not an issue. So Is a high google PR important of not.
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