Google patent inventor
Monika Henzinger is a German computer scientist who worked at Google from 1999 to 2005, first on search algorithms and from 2001 as director of research. Before Google she was an assistant professor at Cornell University and a research scientist at Digital Equipment Corporation, where she worked on the AltaVista search engine. She earned her Ph.D. in computer science at Princeton University in 1993 and has been a professor at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria since 2023. She is an ACM Fellow and received Austria's Wittgenstein Award in 2021.
All their Google patents on Google PatentsPatent US 8,407,231 scores a page by how its links appear and disappear over time: a falling rate of new links marks it as stale, while sudden spikes can signal bought links. The full mechanism and what it means for link building.
Patent US 7,716,216, signed by Georges Harik and Monika Henzinger, measures the distance between query terms in a page through its structure: implicit lists, headings and titles, not just word counts. The rules and what they mean for page structure.
“Older domains rank better” is one of SEO's most repeated myths. We trace it back to a misread patent and show what Google has actually said.