Cracking the Google Code

by Lawrence Deon, May 2005

An Introduction: …if you thought you cracked the Google Code and had Google all figured out … guess again.

Google’s sweeping changes confirm the search giant has launched a full out assault against artificial link inflation & declared war against search engine spam in a continuing effort to provide the best search service in the world… and if you thought you cracked the Google Code and had Google all figured out … guess again.

Google has raised the bar against search engine spam and artificial link inflation to unrivaled heights with the filing of a United States Patent Application 20050071741 on March 31, 2005.

The filing unquestionable provides SEO’s with valuable insight into Google’s tightly guarded search intelligence and confirms that Google’s information retrieval is based on historical data.

What Do These Changes to the Google Code mean to You?

Google has defined their patent abstract as follows:

”A system identifies a document and obtains one or more types of history data associated with the document. The system may generate a score for the document based, at least in part, on the one or more types of history data.”

Google’s patent specification reveals a significant amount of information both old and new about the possible ways Google can (and likely does) use your web page updates to determine the ranking of your site in the SERPs.

Unfortunately, the patent filing does not prioritize or conclusively confirm any specific method one way or the other.

Here’s how Google scores your web pages.

In addition to evaluating and scoring web page content, the ranking of web pages are admittedly still influenced by the frequency of page or site updates.

What’s new and interesting is what Google takes into account in determining the freshness of a web page.

For example, if a stale page continues to procure incoming links, it will still be considered fresh, even if the page header (Last-Modified: tells when the file was most recently modified) hasn’t changed and the content is not updated or ‘stale’.

According to their patent filing Google records and scores the following web page changes to determine freshness.

• The frequency of all web page changes
• The actual amount of the change itself… whether it is a substantial change redundant or superfluous
• Changes in keyword distribution or density
• The actual number of new web pages that link to a web page
• The change or update of anchor text (the text that is used to link to a web page)
• The numbers of new links to low trust web sites

Developing your Web Page for Page Freshness

Now I’m not suggesting that it’s always beneficial or advisable to change the content of your web pages regularly, but it is very important to keep your pages fresh regularly and that may not necessarily mean a content change.

Google states that decayed or stale results might be desirable for information that doesn't necessarily need updating, while fresh content is good for results that require it.

How do you unravel that statement and differentiate between the two types of content?

An excellent example of this methodology is the roller coaster ride seasonal results might experience in Google’s SERPs based on the actual season of the year.

A page related to winter clothing may rank higher in the winter than the summer... and the geographical area the end user is searching from will now likely be considered and factored into the search results.

Likewise, specific vacation destinations might rank higher in the SERPs in certain geographic regions during specific seasons of the year. Google can monitor and score pages by recording click through rate changes by season.

Google is no stranger to fighting Spam and is taking serious new measures to crack down on offenders like never before.

What does the Google Code mean to You?

Keep your pages themed, relevant and most importantly consistent. You have to establish reliability! The days of spamming Google are drawing to an end.

If you require multi page content changes implement the changes in segments over time. Continue to use your original keywords on each page you change to maintain theme consistency.

You can easily make significant content changes by implementing lateral keywords to support and reinforce your vertical keyword(s) and phrases. This will also help eliminate keyword stuffing.

Make sure you determine if the keywords you’re using require static or fresh search results and update your web site content accordingly. On this point RSS feeds may play a more valuable and strategic role than ever before in keeping pages fresh and at the top of the SERPs (Search Engine Ranking Positions).

The bottom line here is webmasters must look ahead, plan and mange their domains more tightly than ever before or risk plummeting in the SERPs.

For more information about Sebo Marketing...