Steady as she goes…

Along with a whole lot of other people, I’ve said many times that if you can add a page of content a day to your site, you’ll be miles further ahead than if you added seven pages once a week — or 30 pages once a month.

This was mostly based on “observed behavior” — watching how the search engines (specifically, Google) seemed to love the sites that did so, and was indifferent to those who didn’t.

Now we’ve got a much better idea of what they’re watching…

This week a patent came to light that explains a lot regarding Google’s behavior since 2003 — many people are treating it like the grand theory of everything, which it’s probably not (Google isn’t going to let everyone know all of their secrets), but it does explain a lot.

You may not be up for reading the patent, but if you’re site owner, I strongly suggest that you look at this excellent summary of it.

It’s still rather lengthy and technical, but it definitely gives you an idea of the many factors Google uses to determine how well (or how poorly) to rank a page in the search results.

There is a lot of debate in the SEO community as to the exact meaning of a lot of this, and suggested best practices as a result. As things begin to distill down towards a concensus, I’ll add updates here.