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Navneet Panda, whom the Google Panda update is named after, has co-invented a new patent that focuses on site quality scores. It’s worth studying to understand how it determines the quality of sites.
Back in 2013, I wrote the post Google Scoring Gibberish Content to Demote Pages in Rankings, about Google using ngrams from sites and building language models from them to determine if those sites were filled with gibberish, or spammy content. I was reminded of that post when I read this patent.
Rather than explaining what ngrams are in this post (which I did in the gibberish post), I’m going to point to an example of ngrams at the Google n-gram viewer, which shows Google indexing phrases in scanned books. This article published by the Wired site also focused upon ngrams: The Pitfalls of Using Google Ngram to Study Language.
An ngram phrase could be a 2-gram, a 3-gram, a 4-gram, or a 5-gram phrase; where pages are broken down into two-word phrases, three-word phrases, four-word phrases, or 5 word phrases. If a body of pages are broken down into ngrams, they could be used to create language models or phrase models to compare to other pages.
Language models, like the ones that Google used to create gibberish scores for sites could also be used to determine the quality of sites, if example sites were used to generate those language models. That seems to be the idea behind the new patent granted this week. The summary section of the patent tells us about this use of the process it describes and protects:
In general, one innovative aspect of the subject matter described in this specification can be embodied in methods that include the actions of obtaining baseline site quality scores for a plurality of previously-stored sites; generating a phrase model for a plurality of sites including the plurality of previously-scored sites, wherein the phrase model defines a mapping from phrase-specific relative frequency measures to phrase-specific baseline site quality scores; for a new site, the new site not being one of the plurality of previously-scored sites, obtaining a relative frequency measure for each of a plurality of phrases in the new site; determining an aggregate site quality score for the new site from the phrase model using the relative frequency measures of the plurality of phrases in the new site; and determining a predicted site quality score for the new site from the aggregate site quality score.
The newly granted patent from Google is:
Predicting site quality
Inventors: Navneet Panda and Yun Zhou
Assignee: Google
US Patent: 9,767,157
Granted: September 19, 2017
Filed: March 15, 2013
Abstract
Methods, systems, and apparatus, including computer programs encoded on computer storage media, for predicating a measure of quality for a site, e.g., a web site. In some implementations, the methods include obtaining baseline site quality scores for multiple previously scored sites; generating a phrase model for multiple sites including the previously scored sites, wherein the phrase model defines a mapping from phrase specific relative frequency measures to phrase specific baseline site quality scores; for a new site that is not one of the previously scored sites, obtaining a relative frequency measure for each of a plurality of phrases in the new site; determining an aggregate site quality score for the new site from the phrase model using the relative frequency measures of phrases in the new site; and determining a predicted site quality score for the new site from the aggregate site quality score.
In addition to generating ngrams from text upon sites, in some versions of the implementation of this patent will include generating ngrams from anchor text of links pointing to pages of the sites. Building a phrase model involves calculating the frequency of n-grams on a site “based on the count of pages divided by the number of pages on the site.”
The patent tells us that site quality scores can impact rankings of pages from those sites, according to the patent:
Obtain baseline site quality scores for a number of previously-scored sites. The baseline site quality scores are scores used by the system, e.g., by a ranking engine of the system, as signals, among other signals, to rank search results. In some implementations, the baseline scores are determined by a backend process that may be expensive in terms of time or computing resources, or by a process that may not be applicable to all sites. For these or other reasons, baseline site quality scores are not available for all sites.
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Source: SEO by the Sea