SEOmoz | Google's Patent: Information Retrieval Based on Historical Data

SEOmoz | Google's Patent: Information Retrieval Based on Historical Data

This above document must be read by anyone who hopes to get high in Google's results pages.
Everything in the patent comes straight from Google, no theories, or rumours.

Although most optimization is common sense, like the fact that search engine spiders can't read pictures etc. In this document you can actually see the other factors that Google is worrying about. There are many - and not all are under your control. That is the way Google want it to be. At the end of day, in Google's eyes, the best ranking for your site is wherever the user wants it.

If Google think it is relevant to their search (and they will try and avoid trickery), it will be somewhere on the first page. If not, it might be somewhere at the back, or even not at all.

In my experience it took a relatively small site about 6 months to break to the number one spot, although it had no serious competitors, and was the 'authoritative' source of information on that subject.

Think about your site. Which category does it fall into?

Fast changing
Dynamic content sites, such as news, active businesses, campaigns etc. fall into this category. Often it is hardest type of site to optimize effectively, as it usually involves dynamic content, which is hard to control. These are the most common site that the user searches for, but they are not always wanted...

Static, Informative

Static pages are what they say. A static site is usually more information and fact-based. It is not keeping up-to-date with any current affairs, but will remain (roughly) in the same state for generally a long time. These sites are often the best sources of information when the user is looking for an answer to a particular question.


Let's follow a few users on their internet travels, and see what they are searching for, why, and what category site Google should return for them:

User A

User A wants to find out how rice krispies are made.
The first start for the average user would be typing 'rice krispies' into the search box. This leaves him with the top result - you guessed it! Kelloggs Rice Krispies home page. This is a static, informative site (as informative as it gets :-) ), which does not change rapidly.

User A refines his search to 'rice krispies made'. This, sure enough, strikes gold.
Howstuffworks is a very informative site, though even those change. At the time of writing, this particular article was added two days ago. For this reason Google may favour it, thinking that it is a dynamic, current-events site, and we are searching for a current-event (see User B). Google would be wrong.

An interesting note - if User A had typed 'how are rice krispies made?' Google ranks howstuffworks at number one. Perfect. This is odd, because usually Google leave short, common words like 'how' and 'are', but it didn't?! AskJeeves have always encouraged people to input questions, although their search algorithm works no differently. It does not interpret those questions, it just tales the keywords out. Perhaps Google are working on the question side of things themselves?

User B

User B is a keen cyclist. He wants to follow the Tour de France, from his home, using the internet. He searches for 'Tour de France'. What should Google give him? A static page?, that would inform him about what the race was, its history, and how it started. This is not what User B expects. Alternatively, a dynamic site, with the current news, and how far the race has gone. This is what User B is looking for. Google will probably work this out by deciding if 'Tour de France' is a current hot topic. If lots of people are searching for it suddenly (Google Zeitgeist), then Google know it must be news-related. They offer news stories on the first page.

User C

User C is doing a school project on the race. Unfortunately he doesn't want the news, but the static sites, unlike User B. He would find the Wikipedia entry further down the page, but at any other time of the year this would probably be ranked quite highly.


The lesson to learn from all of this is that there is no point in competing with sites that aren't in your category. Google will always see the two as different. You need to be able to identify your site, and identify your competitors. Concentrate on having the best content, covering your subject(s) in full. Well written pages (as in text, not just code) will definitely rank higher than poor spelling and grammar.

Good luck, and keep fighting for that #1 spot, just like we all are... :-)

Google Bombing and SEOs

(If you haven't already, read my last post with the screenshot)

Webmasters are constantly trying to find ways to outsmart search engines. This has led to the definition of 'SEO' as 'Search Engine Optimizer'.

Most people, quite rightly, target Google as the main search engine, and concentrate on getting their listing to the first place on SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages :-) ).

These SEOs have been marketing themselves to businesses, claiming that they have the expertise to get a site to the top of the listings. They have created these meaningless acronyms, and try to sound as if they know what they are talking about.

In reality, rather than paying a flat-fee, or even a monthly subscription, there is nothing you can't do yourself.

But look at it this way for a moment. Google's only aim is to get the most relevant website into the top of the search results when the user searches for a particular thing. If you are the most relevant website, you will get to the top. If you aren't, you might get there eventually, with the help of an SEO, but you will soon be over-taken by other, more relevant sites. In short, there is no easy way to fool Google, or any other search engine for that matter.

There is one way however, which takes advantage of the way Google associates words with pages.

If I wanted my page to come at the top whenever a user typed in 'cheap cars', I could fill my page up with the words 'cheap cars' all over. But perhaps, I'm not selling cars, and I'm not who I say I am. For this reason, Google and other search engines do not take half as much notice of what YOU put on YOUR site. Instead, they like to see other sites linking to yours, and then they check what they say about you.

If the 'cheap cars' was a ploy to get people to your margarine website (sorry about the examples ;-) ), any other sites that link to you will not say 'Click here to buy cheap cars'. Instead they will say 'Click here to visit a margarine website'. Much more reliable in Google's eyes. After all, you can easily fiddle what it says on your site, but you can't fiddle what other people's sites say about you.

It comes down to the link text that is important. Although Google do use their patented PageRank technology (PR), this only decides roughly where you will come in the listings when the user types in your keywords. The keywords that Google associates with your site are the words in the links that link to you.

For this reason, try to dissuade people who link to you from putting 'Click here' as the link text. Google will ignore that, because it occurs so frequently, they know the words are not associated with your site in particular. Ask them to make the text of the link the words that you envisage your customers typing into Google when they want to find your website.

An example of how effective this technique can be came up quite recently, and it was termed 'Google Bombing'. Google Bombing is when people make links to a site to make Google associate words with a site that are usually ironic, or (to them) funny.

The most recent example is the one I posted a screenshot of in my last post. Typing the word 'failure' into Google, or even 'miserable failure' brings up President Bush's biography as the first result.

The most influential web pages on the internet are blogs. They keep changing, so Google can always tell what is in at that time, and what is being talked about. This means that they know what people are most likely to be searching for, and what sites they want to see. The problem Google Bombs have, is that the links will soon disappear from the front pages of blogs, and Bush may one day lose his 'failure' status.

Some of the sites that link to Bush's biography can be found here:
Pages linking to George W. Bush's Biography (not all sites contain the word failure but most do)
Weapons of Mass Destruction
(A previous, now extinct, Google bomb, which brought up this page [follow the link] when the words 'weapons of mass destruction' were searched for)

This technique has been known to be used by companies to attack competitors sites, and rank them for keywords that ave nothing to do with their site.

The solution, everyone claims, is for Google to check that the words in the link text actually appear on the target site. This way unless the word 'failure' was in GW Bush's biography, it would not work. Either way, people argue, this unfair situation needs to be sorted out.

Find out more:
Yooter (discovered the bomb)
Razvan Antonescu's blog
BBC Report

The screenshot says it all. I'll post the technical details in a bit. It shows how heavily a search engine relies on its algorithms, but they can often be exploited. 

Mozilla/Firefox Security Flaws

Secunia - Advisories - Mozilla / Mozilla Firefox Frame Injection Vulnerability

Another security hole has been found that exists in Mozilla-based browsers. Although not as serious as the bug that led to the 1.0.4 update, if a user clicks on a link on a specially-crafted website, the website could open a popup window that loaded the target website (ie. an online banking site) but allowed the exploiter's site to insert their own code into a frame on the target site. This means that it would be (in theory) possible to load an online banking site, but change the part that asks the user for their account details to code from another site. They would be entering their details into this other site, rather than their bank's. The address bar would still give the bank's address, and show the padlock symbol.

This flaw, when originally discovered (7 years ago!), existed in nearly all browsers, including Internet Explorer. Although they were all fixed at the time, recent modifications to Mozilla's code seem to have reopened the loophole.

In my opinion, after the initial report, the code should have been rewritten in a way that would prevent this sort of thing happening again.

Just to see it in action, follow the link to Secunia's site to see a demonstration.

Lots of people are being very negative about this new flaw, although to be fair, most of the IE code is way out of date, and IE 7 will not be available to non-XP users. I will discuss IE7 in a future post.

Other blogs:
Theme Wuhan

My First Post

Hello, and welcome to my technology blog.

As you probably guessed from the title, this blog will discuss the latest news in the technology industry, on the internet, and also verging on the scientific.

I will try and post often, although, of course, I will not always be able to do so.
I will also try and talk about smaller issues that many others may have missed, but they are still important enough to know about.

You can see my other blogs by clicking the link to view my profile in the sidebar.

I already have some things I would like to talk to you about, and I will post them soon.

Matthew.