Google submitted a US patent application at the end of March 2005. The application is to protect a number of methods that Google may or may not use to evaluate sites for ranking, and to reduce the possibility of spamming. The publication of the application has led to a lot of speculation on how best to organise your website to achieve good natural rankings.
Google's application was: "A method for scoring a document; obtaining one or more types of history data associated with the document; and generating a score for the document based on the one or more types of history data."
Effectively, Google is saying that it does, will or may rank your site on historical data. The fact that they have included certain methodologies in their application doesn't mean that they are already using them, or even that they intend to use them; just that they are trying to protect those methods against use by their competition.
Looking at some of the main points of the application though, it seems that there may be some areas where webmasters, Internet marketing professional and website designers may be able to help their clients achieve good natural rankings, and we've looked at some of these below:
Updating
It's suggested that Google looks at how often your site is updated. They'll match this with your topic coverage, so updates will be more important for current events, news and media sites than for historical ones. Updating doesn't mean that you have to write hundreds of new articles - indeed, Google may view this as a spamming attempt - but just a regular update, or editing of existing content will help. If you are adding new pages, it might help to link them to other pages on your site, and make sure that you update once a week or once every two weeks, rather than adding a whole lot of new content at one go and then leaving it for six months.
Registration
It appears that Google will be looking at the length of registration and renewals for URLs. Their logic is that sites that register for more than a year are demonstrating a commitment and confidence in their web presence, whereas less legitimate sites will only register for a year. If you are registering a new site, or renewing your existing URL, you may want to look into extending its lifespan, as it could be important.
Click-through rate
Click-through rate, or CTR, indicates to Google how many people are clicking through to your site from the rankings pages. To encourage click-through, you may want to check that your chosen keywords are in your title, and that you include invitations to bookmark or add your site to the reader's favourites list. The "stickier" your site is, the better, as Google may also be able to monitor how long people spend on your site once they've clicked through. If Google is using this data to rank sites, you will want to make your site as interesting as possible so that users stay there for longer.
Links
Google seems to be interested in slow link forming. This means that they are watching out for sites that suddenly develop a rash of links where none existed before, and may categorise this as a form of spamming. They are looking for links that develop naturally over time; links to other established sites and where the anchor text is different each time. It may be worth looking at your anchor text and using a range of keywords that apply to your business, rather than using a set format each time.
Although it's not clear which of these and other methods Google is currently using, it makes sense that they are trying to cut down on the amount of spamming that goes on in some areas of the search engine marketing world. Therefore, common sense would say that the best way to work with Google is to concentrate on organic growth, make your site appealing and useful, update your content on a regular basis and develop good links. It's good business practice to ensure that your site's as useful as possible to your market, and concentrating on this could boost your rankings.
For more hints, read our comments on successful internet marketing.
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