SEO Game Plan | Search Engine Optimization

For many clients and business owners looking for ways to get traffic, they quite frankly don’t understand the rules of the “Google Game”. And that’s because there’s no rule book. A great way to find out what the rules are is to look at the actual patent that Google has filed. (Filing date: Dec 31, 2003)

The patent, entitled Information retrieval based on historical data is an interesting document, and well worth a read if you are interested in how Google determines ranking, and the many factors involved.

This document which was submitted in December of 2003, and is as close to the actual rule book for how Google determines page rankings as you can find. If you want to know the rules of how Google is determining who gets number one page rank, have a read. Here are some interesting points from the patent. We have added our own interpretation for a few of the more relevant items:

A method for scoring a document, comprising:

6. determining an amount by which the content of the document changes over time
READ: Google likes Fresh Content

8. scoring the document based, at least in part, on the frequency at which and the amount by which the content of the document changes over time.
READ: Google likes Continual Fresh Content

24. the appearance of one or more links relates to at least one of a date that a new link to the document appears, a rate at which the one or more links appear over time, and a number of the one or more links that appear during a time period, and the disappearance of one or more links relates to at least one of a date that an existing link to the document disappears, a rate at which the one or more links disappear over time, and a number of the one or more links that disappear during a time period.
READ: if you are Buying Links in an effort to gain inclusing into the Google index, and get links from sites with high PR value, when you stop paying for the links, Google can potentially be tracking this information.

40. 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.
READ: IF you buy your domain names for 1 year in an effort to test the market, Google might view your domain with less authority than a business that has invested for a domain for 10 years.

Read this patent. We believe reading this document will help you on your path to understand exactly how Google does what it does.