One of my favourite blogs to keep an eye on search engine patents filed is Bill Slawski’s SEOByTheSea.com. The reason I like Bill’s blog so much is that he goes into so much depth regarding patents filed by Google, Yahoo and Microsoft.

With so much information out there regarding how google ranks websites and serves up search queries, like chinese whispers, sometimes misinformation can be put out there or vital information can be completely omitted. It is therefore good practise to go back and look at the original patents filled and go back to basics.

Today was one of those back to basics days, so I was viewing Bills Google patent’s page. The google patent I decided to focus on was :

• 6,526,440 Ranking search results by reranking the results based on local inter-connectivity (Google, Inc.)

The abstract definition for this patent is:

A search engine for searching a corpus improves the relevancy of the results by refining a standard relevancy score based on the interconnectivity of the initially returned set of documents. The search engine obtains an initial set of relevant documents by matching a user’s search terms to an index of a corpus. A re-ranking component in the search engine then refines the initially returned document rankings so that documents that are frequently cited in the initial set of relevant documents are preferred over documents that are less frequently cited within the initial set.

Now everybody knows we should be building links from relevant or related sites. To give an example from Brian Johnson’s Halloween Costume site from this post, he had built links from a Halloween Cat site. Are these links going to be beneficial for ranking purposes? The answer is yes, they are related themes. Are they possibly the best links he could have obtained? Probably not, because although related I highly doubt that a Halloween Cat site would rank for the term “Halloween Costume” due to the level of compeition for this keyword term. If you look at the abstract definition for the google patent above to see what happens:

1. Initial Query
2. Google locates suitable websites for the query
3. Google then reranks these websites based on links from these sites to other sites within this subset of results.

So there you have it. When we’re looking to rank for certain terms, we should be looking for links from websites that already rank for these terms.