Ranking Using Distances in Web-Link Graph

Last Modified: Dec 17, 2019 @ 11:14 am

Google has updated its search patent and it was granted towards the end of 2015. Ranking Using Distances in Web-Link Graph is what the new strategy is all about when you dig deeper into the patent system.

Is SEO dead because of this new patent? Definitely NOT

Is Link Building Dead? Definitely NOT (especially as in the patent overview mentions the word link 6 times out of 157 words)

“Methods, systems, and apparatus, including computer programs encoded on a computer storage medium, for producing a ranking for pages on the web. In one aspect, a system receives a set of pages to be ranked, wherein the set of pages are interconnected with links. The system also receives a set of seed pages which include outgoing links to the set of pages.

The system then assigns lengths to the links based on properties of the links and properties of the pages attached to the links. Next, the system computes shortest distances from the set of seed pages to each page in the set of pages based on the lengths of the links between the pages.

Next, the system determines a ranking score for each page in the set of pages based on the computed shortest distances. The system then produces a ranking for the set of pages based on the ranking scores for the set of pages.” Here is the abstract from the united states patent for – Producing a ranking for pages using distances in a web-link graph

Distance Graph SEO

So what does Distance Graph SEO actually mean? Do SEO companies need to be adapting their strategies quickly for 2016? Many will be asking this and the simple answer is not much will be changing if you are already doing SEO techniques that are future proof. In my opinion, these include “getting links from as high-quality websites as possible”. The high-quality sites will not be far away from the seed sites Google bases trust on.

The strategy basically means that if your specific page is close to a high authority site by way of links, Google trusts it more than if it is further away. Google will use a set of high authority ‘seed pages’ from trusted websites. They then calculate the distance from those pages to the pages that are ranking.

So for example, if you had a page on your website about children’s bikes. There might be an article on the BBC News website talking about a charity cycling event which happened recently. This might link to a blog post which talks about the same event and mentions something about children’s cycling.

More on distance Graph SEO

This person could then link from their blog post to your page about children’s bikes. Google would then see this page as more trustworthy because there is only a small distance from the BBC News page to yours.

This is because a good quality page from a trusted site generally won’t link to a bad page. Or to a page that would link to a bad page. Or to a page that would link to a page that would link to a bad page. Get what I mean?

Therefore, on the other side of the coin, if your page is really far away from any good quality seed pages, your trust ratings probably won’t be too high. This is why a single high-quality link can be way more beneficial than a thousand poor quality ones.

This article here explains various SEO tips you can do to combat the distances using Web-Link Graph and it also gives great insight into looking into your silo structure further. The closer your pages are to the homepage the more trusted your page will be. Therefore endless breadcrumbs might not be the best solution.

If you ever want to research into the Google patents then I would strongly suggest reading through this article on the subject. I would also recommend following Bill Slawski because his forte is getting into the nitty-gritty of the patent strategies. He shares some amazing thoughts on this in his articles.