Realtor Websites – Real Web Results Blog

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.

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