2007 August

Aug 23

Google Patent and the SEO

The Google Patent covers all the aspects of search engine optimization (SEO) in a comprehensive manner. Any website that wishes to be a part of the competitive virtual world needs to understand the important clauses covered in the Google Patent. Here is a brief coverage of the most important components involved in it.

The date of inception

Google prioritizes the websites on the basis of its date of inception in Google’s register. It may be the date when the website’s domain was registered with Google or the date when it was first caught by the Google spiders. The older the website, the more recognized it is.

Updates

Google differentiates the websites as ‘fresh’ and ’stale’. A fresh website is always preferred by Google. You can easily notice these facts by doing a research on your own. If you compare the contents of the websites in a Search Engine Result Page (SERP), you can very well notice that the pages are displayed in the order of freshness. Thus you will see the last updated page first and the stale pages at the bottom of the SERP. However, there are certain websites which are by nature ’stale’ and do not require any updates. Google does not penalize these websites for their static contents. Thus a website that describes the biography of prominent people is not likely to suffer like the one that caters the daily weather forecast.

Renewal

A site that applies for a regular renewal will get better ranking than a website that stays with the Google for a shorter period. According to Google, a website that requests renewal possesses quality content and thus is likely to remain for a longer period.

Change in the content

Google monitors the content of the website. If a website that is quite old suddenly changes its content to a totally new one, it will lose all the page ranking that it had achieved even if its domain names and links remain the same. Content is the most important component of a website, according to search engines.

Spamming

Google search engine ethics strictly prohibits any kind of spamming. This includes link farming, using alt texts and other hidden content and cloaking. Apart from discouraging these popular spamming methods, Google also monitors different spamming attempts and prevents them from time to time by the following activities.

· Monitoring the links that are already in the ‘black’ list.

· Monitoring the links that have got an unexpected search engine indexing.

· Monitoring the sites with duplicate contents

· Analyzing the link gain of the websites

Google Patent analyses the nature of the links that are associated with a website. Both inbound and outbound links are monitored, and there are more chances that the Google search engine labels your website as ’spammed’ because of the links that you exchanged with your partner. However, there are appropriate measures adopted by Google to segregate the appropriate links from those irrelevant links.

There are 63 clauses mentioned in the Google Patent. It is very essential that every Webmaster go through each of these and understand the essence of the clauses mentioned in order to improve the SEO of his website.