New Google Patent Indicates Direction Of Changes

In a new patent application filed in December 2003 and made available to the public today, Google gives clues to the changes that began with the Florida Update in November 2003.

The Document is titled "Information Retrieval Based On Historical Data" and basically outlines all the ways Google would like to use your site's past history in determining its present ranking. The document also makes clear that Google now takes a whole site into consideration when ranking unlike PageRank which just considered individual pages.

Some quick points that I jotted down include...

- The inception date and history of a domain, DNS Records, site, content, links, link text, changes, traffic etc. are all tracked (or will be) and are taken into consideration when ranking a site.
- There are different ranking criteria used to evaluate different keyword queries.
- Google puts a great deal of attention on using many different ways to find link exchanges, paid links, doorway pages - anything that appears to be unnatural is now or soon or will be caught and penalized.
- Penalties for acquiring links too fast or too slow, also for having many links with the same link text or different link text
- Commercial queries treated differently. Sites targeting commercial keywords are automatically suspected of spamming.
- Changes in your traffic - up or down - may not be a good thing for your site.
- How often a page is selected from search results and how long visitors stay there compared to other sites is taken into consideration.
- How your site ranks over a long period of time is tracked. A sudden increase in your ranking would lead Google to look more closely to see if you are spamming.
- Age of the domain and how long you registered it for is important. Spammers often just register a domain for just one year. A domain registered for 10 years is likely not a spammer.
- The quality of the advertisers on your site is important.
- Changes in the topics covered or an increase in the number of topics your site covers would be a cause for concern.
- How often a site is found from Bookmarks is important. One way such data is tracked is by using non-browser sources - such as the Google Toolbar.

There are many other points not mentioned here so you may want to read the document for yourself. From my experience some of the items talked about have already been implemented and others have not yet been. At least we now have a confirmation of the direction Google is taking - and many theories (sometimes portrayed as fact) have been dispelled.

Roughing IT!

Where I live, this week has been Spring Break and the kids are off school and in need of activities to keep them occupied and out of mischief. So, I figured it would be a good time for my pre-teen son and I to head up to the family camp along the shores of the Winnipeg River in North West Ontario and take care of some work that needed to be done there.

The lengthy drive was quiet and peaceful - because "modern times" allowed my son to watch DVDs on my laptop the whole way (with head phones on as a bonus for dad!). Once we arrived at our destination, we found that there was still a couple of feet of wet snow in the bush so had to put on snowshoes and make the trek through the bush on a trail we shared with deer carrying our gear with backpacks and hands full. It took two trips to pack all our gear in - You would be amazed at how heavy a notebook computer becomes when carrying it through two feet of snow!

The cabin had settled over the years which caused the sewer pipes to no longer flow downhill which in turn led to frozen waste in the pipes - and broken pipes. Our job was to fix it. I had cleverly planned this exercise for Spring Break and foolishly thought it would still be cold enough that all the spilt sewage would still be frozen on the ground. Wrongo!

It was like a pig wallow under there and to top it off there was only 14 inches of room under that part of the cabin - what a smelly mess! I can honestly tell you that this was one if the most unpleasant jobs I had ever tackled. Add to that the fact that we had no water except for the melt water running off the roof - on its way under the cabin where we were working!

This was one of those weeks where absolutely everything that could go wrong - did. Now, being out in the wilds like that under those conditions - may lead some to believe that we were really roughing it - and we were. But just to show how times have changed - guess what my son and I agreed was the worst part?

The horrible thing was that we were stuck using a dial-up internet connection on a bad telephone line - it was unbearably slooooow!

We could have put up with any discomfort that nature and circumstance could throw at us - but the lack of a high speed internet connection was the one thing that we found the hardest to bear.

"Roughing it" in today's world is a whole lot different than it was even 5 years ago!