March 17th, 2010 by Nick

Google and the other search engines can access a lot more information about your website than you might think. It’s not just the text content and the design. While nobody outside the search companies knows the exact details of how they use the information they gather or how heavily weighted each factor is, we can make some educated guesses. All the things search engines can track are probably used in some way. Google, for instance, almost certainly use everything they can get their hands on. Everything listed in this post will be relevant to SEO.

The first thing is the domain name. If you’ve just registered it there is no history, but if you’ve taken over a domain someone else has been using, the information about who owned it before you is available. They may also track whether the site has changed subject or switched hosting companies. It isn’t necessarily a bad thing to buy and reuse a domain. In fact, if it has a strong trading history, it may be beneficial to your overall search engine optimization as long as you keep up the good work. Google does take site age into account and gives a slight preference to older domains, but they do keep track of ownership and if you completely change the subject and content of the site, they’ll take that into account too.

Of course, they keep track of links and link quality, but what fewer people realise is that they probably check for natural growth patterns your link set. If a few thousand links suddenly turn up, alarm bells will ring and your site will come under some serious scrutiny. Black hat SEO companies don’t mention this when they try to sell you buckets of inbound links, but it is a well established fact in the industry. Inbound link quality is not only measured by the authority of the linking site, but by how many people follow it and land on your site. Traffic pattern information is collected and analysed. How long people spend on the various pages of your site is also available information and we know that this could be an SEO factor.  Growth in content is also trackable. If your domain suddenly adds a thousand subpages in a day, they’ll know. Content generated by RSS feeds and other automated means is also pretty obvious.

It’s still very new technology, but search engines, particularly Google, are starting to use natural language parsing and text analysis software to check for automatically generated keyword rich text pages. The smart money is betting on that happening more and more, and being pretty standard in a few years. Make sure every page on your site contains unique content written by a person (preferably a professional SEO company) and you’re going the right way!

Don’t be afraid of search engines looking closely at your site. For once it really is a case of the innocent having nothing to fear. Following the SEO advice from this website and other white hat sources won’t get you into trouble, and close scrutiny of sites using strong but ethical SEO will actually help you.

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