A patent application from the Mountain View-based search engine company gives some insight into its PageRank technology.
If you’re a legitimate site owner, you’ll want to register your domain for more than one year. Otherwise, the Google PageRank algorithm may rate your site lower than you may deserve.
(W)herein the domain-related information is related to at least one of an expiration date of the domain, a domain name server record associated with the domain, and a name server associated with the domain.
Google wants to maintain its position as the gold standard in web searching. Finding ways to scrub its search results of sites that serve only to deceive web users can only enhance Google’s public reputation.
Another lesson to be gleaned from the application appears to deal with links. Pages or sites with loads of links, and which gain a number of links in a very short span of time, may indicate a site that is attempting to fool the algorithm.
Numerous claims within the application point to the behavior of links over time, their freshness, and the documents they reference all as factors being considered by the algorithm.
All of those claims indicate a site should develop links over time, and establish those links to legitimate sources of information.
The “freshness” of sites also figures in the equation. Google appears to be tweaking its algorithm so sites that update frequently, but not so much that they appear to be gaming the search engine, get a more prominent placement in the search results. This comes from the application:
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.
Interested parties should visit the Patent Office web site and search for 20050071741.
David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business. Email him here.
