Search Engine's Temporal Analysis
Search engines can track how long things (sites, pages, links) have been in existence and how quickly they change. They can track a huge amount of data such as:
- How long a domain has been in existence
- How often page copy changes
- How much page copy changes
- How large a site is
- How quickly the site size changes
- How quickly link popularity builds
- How long any particular link exists
- How similar the link text is
- How a site changes in rank over time
- How related linking sites are
- How natural linkage data looks
In some cases, it makes sense for real websites to acquire a bunch of linkage data in a burst. When news stories about a topic and search volumes on a particular term are high, it would also make sense that some sites may acquire a large amount of linkage data. If that link growth is natural, many of those links will be from high-quality, active, frequently-updated sites. Unless you are doing viral marketing most of the time, if links build naturally, they build more slowly and evenly.
If links build in huge spikes from low-quality sites, then search engines may discount—or even apply a penalty—to the domain receiving that linkage data.
Stale pages may also be lowered in relevancy if other pages in the same topic are referenced or updated more regularly. A page may be considered fresh if it changes somewhat frequently or if it continues to acquire linkage data as time passes. Certain types of queries (like news related ones, for instance) may improve scoring for fresh documents.
Google may also look at how often your site is bookmarked, how frequently people search for your brand, how frequently people click on your listing, who your advertisers are, and other various feedback they can get from their toolbar.
Google was awarded a patent on March 31, 2005 covering these types of topics, but put forth in much greater detail than I have done here. While I do not think they are already necessarily doing all the things they mention in the patent, I think they may eventually use many of them. The patent is interesting and worth reading if you are deeply interested in SEO and information retrieval. If you do not want to read it, you may want to look at the Threadwatch post that mentioned it and the follow- up thread.
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