The Google Popularity Contest Patent
On October 27, 2009, Google was granted a new patent that will adjust where your website sits in the search engines. If you’re interested in the headache-producing patent-speak you can view it here.
Now, it’s my job to help you understand this patent so here I will do my absolute best to de-construct this new patent and help you understand it in plain English.
In a nutshell, this new patent allows Google to take multiple query paths and associate them so that one URL wins out above the others when it’s related to that same kind of query path.
Here’s what I mean.
And for the record, whenever Google refers to “content items” in their patent, or when I refer to them in this blog post, they (and I) are referring to URLs; whether that URL be a “video and/or audio files, web pages for particular subjects, news articles, etc.”
I’ll use an example that Google used in their patent.
When someone visits Google and does a search, during that search session they’ll revise their queries if they aren’t getting the kinds of results that they want, eventually clicking on a URL after they’re done revising their search.
If a “statistically significant number of users” submit that same set of queries and then end up clicking on the same URL this URL will be considered more relevant and that URL will then get a ranking increase.
In another example, if 55% of searchers using a query path such as apples/bananas/strawberries click on FruitURL1 and 35% of searchers using this same path click on FruitURL2, the search engine can rank FruitURL1 first and FruitURL2 second. These can also be ranked as #1 and #2 whenever someone searches on apples/bananas or even apples, bananas, or strawberries as long as that path is identified as being related to the original query path that ranked FruitURL1 first and FruitURL2 second.
In other words, if more people click on FruitURL1 whenever they do a similar query that is identified as part of a query path apples -> bananas -> strawberries, then that URL will get a better ranking in the organic search results.
There’s many more examples provided in the patent itself but suffice it to say, that this is quite honestly, a popularity contest. The more people click through to your website within the organic search results, the more likely you are to have a better ranking.
Think if it like a CTR (click-through-rate) of your website in the natural search results. Much like your positioning in the Google AdWords program is determined by how well your ad performs, such is the case with this new patent. If it’s determined that more people searching on apples/oranges/bananas tend to visit FruitURL1, then FruitURL1 will gain a better position in the organic search engine rankings.
What I found interesting however, is this little snippet of text taken from the patent which gives a little bit of insight into exactly how Google ranks pages.
The search results can, for example, be ranked by a quality measure and a relevance measure. For example, a particular web page can have a quality measure derived from the number of other web pages that are linked to the particular web page, and can have an information retrieval score related to the matching the query terms to words in the particular web page. The information retrieval score can be combined with the page rank to give a final rank to the particular web page.
From this little bit of information we can determine a few things that indicate how Google does in fact rank web pages:
- The “quality measure” of a web page is determined by the number of sites linking to that web page (no surprise there).
- The “information retrieval score” is determined by the number of matching query terms on the web page. Note that this doesn’t mention where on the web page, only that it looks at the web page itself to see if there are matching query terms.
- The “information retrieval score” can be combined with the page rank to give the page a final rank. Here again is the dreaded PageRank. Now, to be fair, the term “page rank” is not capitalized nor does it have a trademark symbol associated with it, but one can only assume that PageRank is definitely playing a role in how web pages rank even though Google has recently removed PageRank from the Google Webmaster tools area (and updated PageRank across the board just recently). Check out this post by Barry Schwartz where he states that “…according to Susan Moskwa from the Google Webmaster Central team “…it [PageRank] was removed [from Google's Webmaster tools] because Google keeps telling webmasters “that they shouldn’t focus on PageRank so much.” They felt it was “silly” to keep telling webmasters that, and at the same time show it in Webmaster Tools. So Google removed it from Webmaster Tools. I think this is a good thing, since I agree it is obsessed over too much, plus what Google showed in Webmaster Tools was not very useful to webmasters.”So, all this said, I wonder then why it’s referred to within the patent? Since it’s not used in it’s proper form, spelled PageRank, do we then assume that they’re just using the phrase “page rank” as an overall encompassing term, not associated with the actual trademarked PageRank?
Since they’ve removed it from Google Webmaster tools but then days later updated the PageRank on the Google toolbar across the board for websites, one can only assume that they are referring to actual PageRank. Never let it be said that Google was transparent.
The bottom line is, this new patent appears as though it will begin ranking web content based upon the number of clicks that an individual URL gets by actual web searchers and the paths that they take to get there. So my advice to you, as a website owner, is to be sure that people want to click over to your website.
Do you offer compelling reasons to do so? Are these reasons contained within your web pages’ descriptions?
If not, now might be a good time to get to work on that.
Related posts:
- Google Webmaster Tools Sitemap Tip
- Local Businesses Getting a Leg Up on Google
- Google’s Link Operator – What’s it REALLY Holding Back?
- Give Your Business Credibility with Google Knol
- Google vs. Bing – SEO Style
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