Google recently filed a patent for information retrieval based on historical data. According to Danny Wall, it has nothing to do with its "My Search History" feature, and everything to do with what factors will matter to how high your website will rank in Google's search engine. Many SEOs may need to do some serious rethinking of their strategies in the coming months.
If you're a big search engine geek like myself, then the latest news of Google's patent filing has probably been filling up a lot of your time. If you're just a normal person with a website, then you may not even know that Google has made a somewhat important patent filing, let alone know what it means to you and your website.
Now before I go any further, let me say that much of what I'm going to tell you is speculation based on what the filing says, and more than a little of my own testing and experience in the SEO field. The Google filing (#20050071741 - Information Retrieval Based on Historical Data) is a rather long winded technical document, and what I'm going to do in this article is attempt to give it to you in layman's language, so you can grasp the overall concepts. I'm also going to limit this article to the "biggies," partially for space reasons and partially to keep this thing from becoming a long winded technical rant.
For starters, just by looking at the patent it becomes pretty obvious that Google is going to begin looking at history very closely. This includes the history of your website, the history of individual pages on your website, and the history of links to your website and pages within it. It will be using this "history" to help determine relevance. Now this doesn't automatically mean that a brand new website can't rank well when it's "new," but it does mean that things like how things grow and change over time will be very important to Google.
It also means that all of the folks using "content randomizers" in an effort to make Google think their sites are being changed frequently are in for a big surprise. Because Google will be maintaining your site's history, it won't take very many iterations of returning to your site before the randomizer brings back content very similar to what was already there many visits previous. You can be sure that any such attempts at "fooling" the search engine will be looked at very harshly.
Having said that, Google is letting it be known that content "freshness" is going to count very heavily. It is going to look for new content on existing pages along with new pages being created.
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