SEM News and Free SEO Search Tool Website » Bill Slawski

10 Most Important SEO Patents: Part 9 – From Ten Blue Links to Blended and Universal Search

Bill Slawski — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 15:42:52 +0000

In the early days of Google, when you performed a search, the results you received were just links to pages found on the Web, showing page titles, snippets, and URLs. Google started adding other types of searches to its Web search, such as:

July, 2001 – Image Search September, 2002 – News search December, [...]…

Google Acquires Fiber Optic Networking Patents (Kansas City and then the World?)

Bill Slawski — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 19:46:56 +0000

A few days ago, I asked the question, Is Google Aiming at Building Faster Networks and Data Transmissions? Google had acquired some interesting patent applications that have the potential to increase the speed and quality of data transmissions. An even more recent intellectual property acquisition by Google points to a growing interest in [...]…

10 Most Important SEO Patents: Part 8 – Assigning Geographic Relevance to Web Pages

Bill Slawski — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 15:55:30 +0000

How much might one page on a website influence the rankings of other pages? When I joined an agency in 2005, our focus was on rankings for individual pages – optimizing their content for specific terms and phrases, and making sure that they had links from other pages, both onsite and off. I found [...]…

Is Google Aiming at Building Faster Networks and Data Transmissions?

Bill Slawski — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 15:44:22 +0000

Last July, a Google Blog post titled More Wood Behind Fewer Arrows announced the closing of Google Labs, where a number of experimental projects taking place at Google were available for the public to explore and try out. Many of those projects sprouted out of Google’s 20 percent time approach, where engineers are encourage [...]…

How Classification of Page Elements and Search Results May Influence Alternative Titles and Snippets Displayed in Google

Bill Slawski — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 20:30:49 +0000

Has an improvement in how Google understands the layout of pages, and understands and classifies different elements found on page had an impact on the titles and snippets that we see in search results? Google may classify queries to decide what to show for those page titles and snippets in search results, but it’s [...]…

Google’s Query Based Analysis and Reranking of Search Results

Bill Slawski — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 15:36:38 +0000

Somewhere in an alternative universe, it’s possible that one of the most feared hitters in baseball might have instead been known as one of its greatest pitchers. Babe Ruth started out as a pitcher for the Boston Red Sox in 1914, and when approached about getting his bat into the lineup on a daily [...]…

Apple’s Siri Patent Application

Bill Slawski — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 10:49:42 +0000

A patent application was published today which describes the kind of intelligent automated assistant that we see in use on Apple’s iPhone 4S, known as Siri. But the patent isn’t necessarily limited to the iPhone application itself, and the describes how such a system could be used in a number of ways, including with [...]…

10 Most Important SEO Patents: Part 7 – Sets, Semantic Closeness, Segmentation, and Webtables

Bill Slawski — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 05:10:56 +0000

Yesterday, I wrote about how Google may be looking at the semantics associated with HTML heading elements, and the content that they head, and how the search engine might be looking at such content with similar headings across the Web to determine how much weight to give words and phrases within those headings.

That [...]…

Heading Elements and the Folly of SEO Expert Ranking Lists

Bill Slawski — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 14:51:11 +0000

How important are heading elements to the rankings of webpages by search engines?

I’ve seen arguments by people who write about and study search engines and SEO very closely, which often appear written up in “SEO Expert Ranking Lists,” that HTML heading elements (<h1>, <h2>, etc.) are very important, arguments that heading elements [...]…

10 Most Important SEO Patents: Part 6 – Named Entity Detection in Queries

Bill Slawski — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 07:31:14 +0000

In the last installment of this series, we looked at how Google may be using phrase based indexing to use the fact that many phrases often tend to co-occur with other phrases within the content of web pages, to re-rank those pages. When we look at phrases, we also need to drill down to [...]…

IBM Assigns 217 More Patent Filings to Google including Wireless Phones and Javascript Widgets

Bill Slawski — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 15:52:47 +0000

Looks like Google and IBM are working together again to build up Google’s patent portfolio, from an update at the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) patent assignment database. Details beyond the actual patents involved aren’t known yet. The last couple of times I wrote about large patent transactions between Google and IBM [...]…

How Google Might Identify Transient Content on Webpages

Bill Slawski — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 20:57:27 +0000

Back in 2007, I wrote about a Yahoo patent describing how Yahoo! might crawl a webpage, and then recrawl the same page around a minute later to see if any of the links on the page had changed. It might do that to try to identify what it called “Transient Links,” or links that [...]…

Forget Siri: Google Voice Phone Searches May Display Results on TV

Bill Slawski — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 00:58:21 +0000

Apple’s latest phone has a slick voice controlled feature named Siri that lets you tell your phone to do a number of different things, and can even power searches that it will answer for you. There’s been some speculation that type of verbal interaction might harm Google because it would bypass the search advertisements [...]…

10 Most Important SEO Patents, Part 5 – Phrased Based Indexing

Bill Slawski — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 05:44:25 +0000

The builder of the largest search engine in the World during the first decade of the 21st century, joined Google shortly after building that search engine, and possibly licensed the technology behind it to Google. She worked for Google for a number of years, creating a way of indexing pages based upon the meaningful [...]…

Google Acquires Significant 3G Patents

Bill Slawski — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 00:01:39 +0000

Google acquired a number of patents from a company that’s presently suing a number of major developers of wireless hardware devices for patent infringement. The company is Gold Bridge Technology (GBT), and they tell us on their “Meeting the Challenge” page:

One of GBT’s most significant group of patents pertains to the UMTS W-CDMA [...]…

10 Most Important SEO Patents: Part 4 – PageRank Meets the Reasonable Surfer

Bill Slawski — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 15:10:41 +0000

PageRank is a measure that stands for a probability that if someone starts out any page on the Web, and randomly clicks on links they find on pages, or gets bored every so often and teleports (yes, that is official technical search engineer jargon) to a random page, that eventually they will end up [...]…

10 Most Important SEO Patents: Part 3 – Classifying Web Blocks with Linguistic Features

Bill Slawski — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 16:42:47 +0000

In earlier days of SEO, many search engine optimization consultants stressed placing important and valuable content towards tops of HTML code on pages, based upon the idea that search engines would weigh prominent content more heavily if it appeared early on in documents. There are still very well known SEO consultants who include information [...]…

10 Most Important SEO Patents: Part 2 – The Original Historical Data Patent Filing and its Children

Bill Slawski — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 17:58:12 +0000

I like looking at patents and whitepapers and other primary sources from search engines to help me in my practice of SEO. I’ve been writing about them for more than 5 years now, and am putting together this series of the 10 Most important SEO patents to share some of what I’ve learned during [...]…

10 Most Important SEO Patents: Part 1 – The Original PageRank Patent Application

Bill Slawski — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 15:18:42 +0000

The first PageRank patent application was never published by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), it was never assigned to a particular company or organization, and it was never granted. It avoids dense legal language and mathematics that can make reading patents difficult, and it captures the excitement of a candidate Ph.D. [...]…

Expanded Snippets, Google’s Instant Previews, and the Costs and Benefits of Making Changes

Bill Slawski — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 07:45:20 +0000

The decision process that you go through when deciding to make changes to your site can be tough. Even if those changes are likely necessary and needed, determining the best way to implement them can make you pause, and spend a lot of time considering all the potential alternatives that you might have. You [...]…