Here’s how Google scores your web pages

In addition to evaluating and scoring web page content, the ranking of web pages are admittedly still influenced by the frequency of page or site updates.

What’s new and interesting is what Google takes into account in determining the freshness of a web page.

For example, if a stale page continues to procure incoming links, it will still be considered fresh, even if the page header (Last-Modified: tells when the file was most recently modified) hasn’t changed and the content is not updated or ‘stale’.

According to their patent filing Google records and scores the following web page changes to determine freshness.

• The frequency of all web page changes
• The actual amount of the change itself… whether it is a substantial change redundant or superfluous
• Changes in keyword distribution or density
• The actual number of new web pages that link to a web page
• The change or update of anchor text (the text that is used to link to a web page)
• The numbers of new links to low trust web sites (for example, a domain may be considered low trust for having too many affiliate links on one web page).

Although there is no specific number of links indicated in the patent it might be advisable to limit affiliate links on new web pages. Caution should also be used in linking to pages with multiple affiliate links.


Rashmi Longia
Web Page Design