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Home::Link Popularity
Google gives Web Page History More Importance
Author : Rick Hendershot
by Rick Hendershot, e_Marketing
Blog
The Google patent application submitted in March, 2005 has
generated a good deal of debate among search engine optimization
experts. The patent document contains many general suggestions
about the direction Google wants to move their search criteria
and ranking techniques in the near future.
The document points out two areas in particular in which "there
remains a need to improve the quality of results generated by
search engines." (0009) These two areas are
(a) artificially inflated rank due to spamming techniques, and
(b) stale documents that rank higher than fresh ones, and
therefore "degrade the search results".
Google's ingenious proposal is to deal with both of these
problems by focusing on the history of web documents and web
links. Assuming they have the technology to record such a
massive amount of information, their objective seems to be to
keep a detailed record of the pattern of changes within web
pages.
This should address the spam issue by revealing unnatural
patterns of change. Too many links too quickly suggests
"unnatural" linking activity has been taking place. Significant
links that come and go might suggest that expensive links are
being purchased on a temporary basis and are not "natural".
And it should address the "staleness" issue by looking at the
way specific pages have been updated. If a page that has ranked
high in specific searches has not been updated for a period of
time, this will be seen as a reason to downgrade the importance
of that page. Other pages with more activity, more up to date
information, and more linking activity, all other things being
equal, will rank higher.
History is more important than ever
This means Google either already gives, or intends to give the
"history" of documents more significance. And not just the date
when the document is created, or most recently changed. They
also propose tracking the pattern of the changes in content,
changes in anchor text of links, changes in numbers and quality
of inbound links, changes in quality and number of outbound
links, changes in other pages within the same associated group
of documents, and even changes within the pages linking to a
document.
On top of that, they propose tracking user habits and patterns
over time. How users got to the page in question, how long they
stayed there, how many times the particular page was clicked on
when it was presented in a search...a very impressive
(bewildering?) array of factors.
In fact this is an ingenious attempt to solve the "spam" and
"staleness" problems at the same time. The major assumption is
that up-to-date "relevant" content -- the kind the search
engines are supposed to be giving us -- will be regularly
updated, will be inter-connected by an ever-increasing (and
regularly changing) group of inbound links. In other words,
links will come and go, changes will happen gradually, and
"spikes" in either traffic or increased link activity will be
sure signs of spamming activity.
Conclusions
Whether all of these measures will ever be fully implemented or
not is beside the point. These suggestions make sense, and will
be adopted to some extent by all search engines. The future has
been defined, and it is up to creators of websites and online
marketers to make the most of it.
The most important conclusions we can take from the patent
application is that the history of our pages matters. In
practical terms, this means:
-- Rapid and wholesale changes in content will be looked upon
with suspicion -- Rapid increases in numbers of inbound and
outbound links will trigger red flags -- Changes in anchor text
that alter or remove its relationship to on-page content will be
suspect -- Lack of regular and steady (but not radical) changes
will get your pages labelled "stale" -- Links that were valuable
last year (or month?) will not be as valuable this year (or
month) because they are becoming "stale".
In other words, webmasters and internet marketers must keep
adding content, keep upgrading their pages, keep improving and
adding new ones, continue to get new links, and freshen up their
old ones if they can.
But they should not do any of it too quickly.
Think of this "history" component as a method of measuring
change. It may seem ridiculously vague, but this is the reality
we have to deal with.
In the new world order, change has three speeds: Too Slow, Too
Fast, and Just Right.
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