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Google's infallible memory

The entry lines in front of the OMD are already as big as the anticipated sales volume for many exhibitors. I should use my time more wisely by writing about a topic that I wanted to talk about for month now. Two articles by SeoByTheSea and the hope that the aforementioned lines will be considerably shorter after writing this have been crucial in finally making me do this.

How much influence do the factors “time” and “currentness” have on Google's rankings? Bill dug up a Google-Patent from the year 2003 which has recently been duly appropriated and expanded and of which Matt Cutts is incidentally listed as one of the inventors. In this patent, Google lists methods and proceedings to recognize changes in websites to then measure and classify them. Then this data flows, at least partially, into the ranking.

To do this they do not only save the current state of the index but make complete or incremental “snapshots” at certain intervals to make out changes. Besides the page content, we also have linking data which is presumably valued highly, flowing into this process. This gives Google the ability to form – either generally or in terms of queries – averaged values for the changes on the site and then compare them to values of a single site.

One application for this has come to light a few month ago when Google minted the term QDF (Query deserves Freshness): searchentries, for which Google notices a strong increase in searchqueries, are filled with current SERPs more often than is normally the case.

That this also has the possibility to go in the other direction can be seen with the current SEO-competition and the keyword “befreiphone”. Two pages, that build up links extremely fast and strong, were knocked out of the top10. The users commitment on the Supertopic-Forum thrived for a long time and it was only yesterday that they were not to be found on the first page anymore, while Udo Vetter's contribution was sacked shortly after the start of the competition. And even though he suspects that “someone higher up pulled the plug” – I assume that this could be the consequence of this or a similar patent.