Employees of Google have filed a patent with the United States Patent & Trademark Office (#20050071741) that outlines how Google is using or will use historical data to rank websites. This pending patent gives credence to the Google Sandbox theory, in that historical data is being used to determine a website’s ranking in the search engine results pages (SERP’s).
Some of the highlights of this patent include:
1. Adding links too quickly will send up a red flag for a potential SPAM site
2. Adding links too slowly will mean a website is not popular among its peers
3. Having the same anchor text in back links on multiple sites will signal potential SPAM
4. Having deliberately different anchor text in back links on multiple sites will signal potential SPAM
5. Registering domain names for 1 year at a time will signal potential SPAM (longer domain name registrations preferred)
6. Pages with stale content decay in value over time
7. Stale links decay in value over time
8. Older websites that make sudden changes may signal a change in ownership of the website and thus will be devalued
9. Browser Favorites add value to a website’s rankings
10. Substantial versus shallow website content changes are measured
11. Change in keyword density is measured
12. The number of links to low trust websites (such as affiliate links) are counted and given a value.
13. Outbound links to trusted sites help in the rankings
14. Past ranking on the Google search results pages influence current rankings
15. Google AdSense click-through rate (CTR) helps determine the quality of a website
Google’s grading system may be analogous to a report card / transcript model. The report card in Google’s grading system are the search engine rankings themselves and the transcripts are the historical data. It seems that Google keeps a permanent record of all websites with different grades given for all of their ranking criteria, thus making up the transcript.
Of course, this information was released the day before April Fool’s Day so a misinformation or disinformation campaign is certainly possible on Google’s part. It may just be another cat and mouse game with the Webmasters and SEO community. Or this may be a trial balloon sent up to gauge the reactions of the community. Only Google knows for sure. And that’s the only thing of which one can be sure.
Hosting co One and One who has done massive ammounts of advertising lately, only allows for one yr domain registration on their user interface sign-up forms. I have talked to two levels of their customer service about this and while they have been most polite, they don’t seem to be able to provide a work-around,. They did promise to report it as problematic for clients. So for now–no way around the one year at a time registration for 1&1 customers.