How Google Tracks User Behavior

User Data Affects Your Rankings

Originally Published: May 10 , 2005

Google has recently filed a patent that details many points that Google uses to rank web pages. The title of the patent is "Information retrieval based on historical data" and it reveals details of algorithms that Google uses in addition to its main ranking algorithms.

In this article series, we're trying to find out what this means to your web site and what you have to do to optimize your web pages so that you get high rankings on Google. Click here to read:

1. How Page Changes Affect Rankings On Google
2. Domain Name Influences On Google Rankings
3. Inbound Links & Your Rankings On Google
4. Google Search Results & User Data: Affects On Your Rankings

How Google might track your surfing behavior

Last week, we informed you that Google tracks user behavior to determine the ranking of web sites. Google has recently released web accelerator program that is intended to make surfing faster for broadband users. Google might use this program to track the surfing behavior of people who have the web accelerator installed.

This means that Google now has at least four different tools that allow Google to track which web sites you visit: the Google toolbar, Google Desktop, Gmail and the new Google web accelerator.

These tools could help Google to collect the user information that is mentioned in the patent specification. As soon as you login to any Google service (Gmail, AdWords, etc.) this information can be assigned to your name and address.

Other factors that might influence your Google rankings

In addition to factors regarding user behavior, link popularity and domain names (see previous issues of this newsletter), the patent specification lists some other factors that might influence how Google selects results.

The document specification indicates that web pages with frequent ranking changes might be considered untrustworthy.

In addition, keywords that have little change in the result pages are probably matched to domains with stable rankings. Keywords with many changes in the results are probably matched to domains with more votality.

What does this mean to your web site?

Regarding these factors, there's nothing you can do to influence the ranking of your web site. Fortunately, there are many other factors that allow you to influence your rankings on Google.

In general, it is important that your web page content is optimized for Google. The ranking factors mentioned in the patent specification are only additional factors. If your web page content is not optimized, all other ranking factors won't help you much.

Remember that this patent doesn't mean that Google really uses all of this. The patent only lists options that might be used by Google. The most important factors for high rankings on Google are good incoming links and optimized web page content. You should make sure that your web site has both if you want high rankings on Google.

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• IBP All In One Promotion Software
  All You Need To Get Top 10 Rankings On Google And Yahoo!
• Successful Advertising With Google's AdWords
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February 04 2012 04:18 UTC