Take the mention of content staleness and how that can help or hinder a site's rankings. Or how about the fact that Google plans to use more of that information it collects on us via the Google Toolbar and potentially any other piece of Google software we use.

Not to mention that they likely plan to use recent acquisitions like Urchin to help further study how we search, and then apply that to the algorithms.

Then there's the mention of qualifying domain names and using their registrar status to verify domains. One thing that caught my eye, only renewing a domain yearly could negatively impact you:

"For example, domains can be renewed up to a period of 10 years. Valuable (legitimate) domains are often paid for several years in advance, while doorway (illegitimate) domains rarely are used for more than a year. Therefore, the date when a domain expires in the future can be used as a factor in predicting the legitimacy of a domain and, thus, the documents associated therewith."

With all this talk of links and how stale or fresh they are, you'd think that was all the patent was about, but you would be misinformed.

This patent covers a lot of ground breaking stuff. All in the hopes of making Google a more relevant search engine.

Through a combination of staleness or dating, domain name history, usage, how a listing performs currently (that is, if it appears and doesn't get clicks, is it relevant) and many more criteria, measuring both on the page factors and off the page factors, Google plans on revamping its ranking capabilities.

Don't get me wrong, I think these proposed changes are great. In fact I bet a bunch of them are already in use. I know for a fact that when changes are made on some of my client's sites, they lose rankings simply because they change, yet they gain them back within a few days or weeks. This could be due to the dating factor, a "new" page may be penalized (or at least devalued) until it becomes sufficiently stale. Remember, that to Google, any changed page could be considered new if the amount of change crosses that magic threshold value. Where that threshold is nobody knows outside of Google.

And these thresholds could vary by industry, or classification. If Google has used some of Applied Semantic's technology - that being the categorization of sites and pages into topics (similar to the Open Directory Project's categorization) then it would make sense that they could define rules around those categories.

So while others may focus on the whole linkage implications, you really should take this patent as a whole because you can bet that in some form or other each and every item in it will be used if it isn't already.

Rob Sullivan
Head Organic Search Strategist
Enquiro.com

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