Thank you for adding such a useful information in here. I personally agree to your ideas, techniques and the ways described by you in here. I feel this SEO Topic and the information is very useful both for the current legends in the market as well as specially for the new commers.

We hope you will keep on sparing your time and add more useful informations appropriate and helpful for the users.

This topic has really very much helped us. Thank You

Kind regards,

Tina

Kudos on an excellent post. Given the current weight given to back-links, this is surely an excellent way to get a more accurate way to measure page / link value.

I haven’t read the full paper and forgive me if the answer to this question is provided there, but in your experience, how long do you need to collect data before getting an accurate measure of page value? Or does google maintain a cache history for a given page?

Also, will you attempt to compute the value of a given individual link based on external out-bound links, etc.?

Again, great post!

Mike - I am really glad you enjoyed the article.

I find your advice to use search engine patents to derive methods of developing SEO metrics simply invaluable. I learned quite a bit from this post - and found myself alive with new questions as to how we might use existing patent documentation in our research.

In short, thank you very much for sharing your line of thinking here. I expect to have this post bookmarked for quite some time, and I will certainly be referring my colleagues to your blog in the future when they’re looking for cutting edge SEO thinking.

Cheers,
Mike

I don’t think I’ve seen any tools that analyse Crawl or Index rates to measure link value before.

Another good signal to add into the mix - not least because it comes direct from Google rather than a 3rd party. There is definitely an over-reliance on the Yahoo backlinks query at present.

No single measure is ever going to be perfect, but a tool that brings them all together would be a great time-saver.

Cheers

Indexing happens after crawling but you normally see a more fresher cache because caching is easy and happens faster than indexing. Indexing is a more complex process and takes more time.

From observation I can tell they use incremental crawling but I need to research a little bit to understand their criteria they use to make the updates.

So the date we see on the cached version of a page shows the time it was indexed, because obviously the time a page was indexed must always be later than the time is was crawled.

The date that is shown in the SERP on the other hand is the date the page was crawled.

Just wanted to make sure I get this right…

Cheers

You are right. I thought “earlier” and “sooner” meant the same. I mean sooner in the sense that the cache date will be closer to the current time.

Thanks for your kind words. I am glad you enjoyed the article.

it is always a pleasure to read your articles because you seem to be one of the few guys who actually think topics through before they post.

So much for the flattery, I have a question about your article:

To my humble mind, the cache date should be earlier than the index date, right?
But if we look at this:

Link Building Secrets by Hamlet Batista
The world’s top link building experts get together to provide a single source of never-before revealed link building tips, tricks and strategies.
…/seo-sem/link-building-secrets/hamlet-batista.php - 24k - 1 Mar 2008

This is G o o g l e’s cache of …/hamlet-batista.php as retrieved on 5 Mar 2008 13:03:53 GMT.

So the cache date is actually later. But you said in your article: “The cache date is logically sooner.”

Am I not getting something?
Cheers,
Arian