LOOKING FOR MORE INFORMATION ON THE GOOGLE WEB-RANKING PATENT APPLICATION? David Utter from Webpronews.com provides an initial breakdown here. It could be important stuff for people that rely on Google rankings to generate business:

If you're a legitimate site owner, you'll want to register your domain for more than one year. Otherwise, the Google PageRank algorithm may rate your site lower than you may deserve.

Spammers tend to register domains for the minimum amount of time, one year, and Google's patent application seems to say that's a bad move.

Another lesson to be gleaned from the application appears to deal with links. Pages or sites with loads of links, and which gain a number of links in a very short span of time, may indicate a site that is attempting to fool the algorithm. Numerous claims within the application point to the behavior of links over time, their freshness, and the documents they reference all as factors
being considered by the algorithm.

The "freshness" of sites also figures in the equation. Google appears to be tweaking its algorithm so sites that update frequently, but not so much that they appear to be gaming the search engine, get a more prominent placement in the search results.