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How Does A Website be Seen as Authoritative?
If you’ve done any SEO for a site, you may recognize some of the steps involved in working towards making a website authoritative:
- Conduct keyword research to find appropriate terms and phrases for your industry and audience
- Review the use of keywords on the pages of your site to make sure it includes those in prominent places on those pages
- Map out pages on a site to place keywords in meaningful places
- The meaningful places on your pages are determined by information retrieval scores for HTML elements such as titles and Headings and Lists
- The placement of keywords in prominent and important places on your pages can make your pages more relevant for those keywords
- Research the topics your pages are about, and make sure they answer questions that your audience may have about those topics in trustworthy and meaningful ways
Surfacing Authoritative Search Results for Queries Above a Threshold
A patent granted to Google this week focuses upon authoritative search results. It describes how Google might surface authoritative results for queries and query revisions when there might not be results that meet a threshold of authoritativeness for the initial query. Reading through it was like looking at a mirror image of the efforts I usually go through to try to build authoritative search results for a search engine to surface. In addition to using some of the same languages that I use to describe how I build authoritative pages, the patent also defines what an authoritative site is for us in terms that I might find myself using too:
In general, an authoritative site is a site that the search system has determined to include particularly trusted, accurate, or reliable content. The search system can distinguish authoritative sites from low-quality sites that include shallow content or that frequently include spam advertisements. Whether the search system considers a site to be authoritative will typically be query-dependent. For example, the search system can consider the Centers for Disease Control site, “cdc.gov,” to be an authoritative site for the query “CDC mosquito stop bites.” Still, it may not consider the same site to be authoritative for the query “restaurant recommendations.” A search result that identifies a resource on an authoritative site for the query may be authoritative. The search system can determine whether to obtain an authoritative search result in response to a query in various ways, which will be described below.
This definition seems to tell us that authoritative sites are high-quality sites. The timing of a couple of other actions at Google seems to fit in well with the granting of this patent. One is the publication of a blog post by the long time Google search engineer Ben Gomes (who joined Google in 1999), on steps they have taken to improve the quality of results at Google, titled Our latest quality improvements for Search. In that post, Ben points out that Google has published a brand new set of Search Quality Rater Guidelines – May 11, 2017,, publicly, so that they are shared with the world instead of just to Google’s search quality raters.
One of the named inventors on this patent was an inventor on another patent that I wrote about, which focused on high-quality sites. That patent is worth reading about together with this one. That post is one I wrote named Google’s High Quality Sites Patent. As I said of that patent, it describes its purpose in this way:
This patent identifies pages that rank well for certain queries and looks at the quality of those pages. If a threshold amount of those ranking pages is low-quality, the search engine might use an alternative query to find the second set of search results that include pages from high-quality sites. Those search results from the first query might then be merged with the results from the alternative query, with the pages from the low-quality sites removed so that the search results include a greater percentage of pages from high-quality sites.
Authoritative Search Results are Higher Quality Results
So this new patent aims to find results from higher quality search results as authoritative search results. Google does seem to be targeting higher-quality pages these days with the results they show.
Google sets a fairly high bar with search results, telling us in the description of this new patent:
Internet search engines aim to identify resources, e.g., web pages, images, text documents, multimedia content, e.g., videos relevant to a user’s information needs, and present information about the resources in a manner that is most useful to the user.
In the summary section for this patent, the objective of the patent is identified to us as finding authoritative answers:
This specification describes how a system can improve search result sets by including at least one authoritative search result that identifies a resource on an authoritative site for a query. The system can include an authoritative search result, for example, when scores of an initial first search result set are low or when the query itself indicates that the user seeks resources from an authoritative site.
How This Patent Returns Authoritative Search Results
A search engine doesn’t choose the query terms that someone might use to perform a search, but it might identify query refinements based upon the initial query term. If the original query doesn’t return an authoritative result, Google might insert into the results shown for some authoritative results for one of those query refinements based upon that original query. It might show that authoritative search results at the top of the results that it returns. This means that Google will be more likely to return high-quality sites at the top of search results rather than results from sites that might not be seen as authoritative sites.
The patent that was granted this week is:
Obtaining authoritative search results Inventors: Trystan Upstill, Yungchun Wan, and Alexandre Kojoukhov Assignee: Google Inc. US Patent: 9,659,064 Granted: May 23, 2017 Filed: March 15, 2013
Abstract
Methods, systems, and apparatus, including computer programs encoded on computer storage media, for obtaining authoritative search results. One of the methods includes receiving a first search query. First search results responsive to the first search query are obtained. Based on the first search query or the first search results, an authoritative search result that identifies a resource on an authoritative site for the first search query is obtained. A ranking of the authoritative search result and the one or more first search results is generated. The ranking of the authoritative search result and the one or more first search results is provided in response to the first search query.
There were some fascinating points raised in the patent, which makes the whole thing worth spending time reading carefully:
- Google might maintain a “keyword-to-authoritative site database,” which it can refer to when someone performs a query.
- The patent described “Mapping” keywords on pages on the Web as sources of information for that authoritative site database.
- Google may also maintain “topic keyword and category keyword mappings to authoritative sites.”
- Google may calculate confidence scores, which represent a likelihood that a keyword refers to a specific authoritative site if received in a query.
- The patent talks about Mapping revised queries, like this: “The system can also analyze user query refinements to generate additional topic or category keyword mappings or refine existing ones.”
- Interestingly, the patent talks about revisions in queries as substitute terms that might be used “aggressively to generate revised search queries.” I’ve written about substitute terms before in How Google May Rewrite Your Search Terms.
- If the original query and the replacement query used to surface authoritative search results are similar enough (based upon a similarity score that would be used to compare them), that authoritative search result may be demoted in the results shown to a searcher.