Google’s patent reveals some logic behind website ranking

If you have been following the world of SEO for a long time, you might be aware of the Google Medic update. As the name suggests, this update was related to websites in the medical and health niche which was related to how the content should be on such sites. Google has also said time and again that the medical niche websites should not have content that is misleading since it can have a damaging effect on a person’s health.

Now, Bill Slawski has revealed something about a Google patent filed years ago that might explain the reasoning behind Google’s medic update and how it ranks websites on the search engine.

However, it is worth noting that this is a patent which involves the working of an algorithm. But it does not tell us if the patent is being used or not so we don’t know if this technique is being applied.

The first thing in Google’s patent is that they classify websites based on topics and their search queries are also divided into topics. Google names Topic as “knowledge domain” and even says that it does not have relation to “knowledge graph”.

So when Google finds that certain query belongs to this knowledge domain, they give the user the websites that belong to that particular knowledge domain. Now, it might sound simple but it is not simple in real life.

Because we know that there will be millions of knowledge domains and 10x the websites for those knowledge domains. The patent also reveals that websites are classified by Google based on authoritativeness.

One section of the patent reveals that there are various factors for “classification of the website, such as an authoritativeness, responsiveness for a particular knowledge domain, another property of the website, or a combination of two or more of these.”