Patents provide exclusive rights to your inventions from the date of filing of the patent application, and are filed through USPTO. Gov – SEO related patents provide insights into search engines’ algorithms. The exact number of patents is not displayed online, but different reports have shown that Google owns hundreds of thousands, presumably, patents with USPTO.
Today, I would like to share my all time favorite SEO patents filed by Google that has provided me insights into their algorithm and helped me align our SEO strategies accordingly with respect to Google’s guideline.
#5 – AGENT RANK
Inventors: Minogue; David; (Palo Alto, CA) ; Tucker; Paul A.; (Mountain View, CA)
Filed: August 5, 2011
This patent gives insights into how Google might be using your identity online as a source to organize rankings in Google. Similar to page rank, this patent give scoring system to your profile (Google+) and associate your content with digital signatures.
Abstract of Patent
The present invention provides methods and apparatus, including computer program products, implementing techniques for searching and ranking linked information sources. The techniques include receiving multiple content items from a corpus of content items; receiving digital signatures each made by one of multiple agents, each digital signature associating one of the agents with one or more of the content items; and assigning a score to a first agent of the multiple agents, wherein the score is based upon the content items associated with the first agent by the digital signatures.
SEO Takeaways:
1- Your Google+ agent rank can influence your page rankings on Google if you have a high score. The score can be determined by the no # of people who followed you and how authoritative they are on the web and influential.
2- This can avoid duplicate content issues by associating your Google+ profile with your content as the first source of information.
#4 – Inferring Geographic Locations for Entities Appearing in Search Queries
Inventors: Karanjkar; Sushrut; (Fremont, CA) ; Subramanian; Viswanath; (San Jose, CA) ; Thakur; Shashidhar; (Saratoga, CA)
Filed: December 16, 2011
Ever thought why a certain website is ranking higher in country specific Google even if the site has no relation with the country? On June 21, 2012 Google was granted a patent to log information in a query log file that tracks your clickstream data and rank sites based on clicks that are coming from specific locations.
What this means to SEO is simple. if you have a high number of people clicking your website from a specific terms in a specific country, it will have an big influence on your ranking in that specific country.
Abstract Of Patent
A server system associates one or more locations with a query by identifying the query, selecting a set of documents responsive to the query, and assigning weights to respective documents in the set of documents based, at least in part, on historical data of user clicks selecting search result links in search results produced for historical queries substantially the same as the identified query. Websites hosting the selected documents are identified, and, for each website, location-specific information for one or more locations is retrieved, including a location-specific score that corresponds to the likelihood that the respective location corresponds to a respective website. For each respective location for which location-specific information was retrieved, aggregating the location-specific scores, as weighted by the document weights, to compute an aggregated likelihood that the respective location is associated with the query. A specific location is assigned to the query when predefined criteria are satisfied.
SEO TakeAways:
1- Traffic data can actually affect your ranking and organic visibility according to that country’s search engine. Google wants to get very geo, and this patent is proof. Get local. Link build on local entities and talk about local things in content.
#3 – Ranking documents based on user behavior and/or feature data
Inventors: Dean; Jeffrey A. (Palo Alto, CA), Anderson; Corin (Mountain View, CA), Battle; Alexis (Redwood City, CA)
Filed: June 17, 2004
This patent specified that not every link on the page is of equal value, the patent says that aside from using anchor text, Google might be looking at other features associated with the links and may determine how much value it should give to the link based on these new features.
Some of the new features described in the patent are such as a) font size of anchor text B) the position of the link c) if the link is in a list d) number of words in the anchor text e) how commercial the anchor text associated with the link might be f) whether the URL of target URL is on the same domain and many more features.
Abstract Of Patent
A system generates a model based on feature data relating to different features of a link from a linking document to a linked document and user behavior data relating to navigational actions associated with the link. The system also assigns a rank to a document based on the model.
SEO Takeways:
1- Make sure your links on the page have proper attributes that the patent has laid out.
2- Links that is shown to the top of the page may carry for link value.
#2 – Presenting Social Search Results
Inventors: Callari; Francesco G.; (San Francisco, CA) ; Kulick; Matthew E.; (San Francisco, CA)
Filed: December 1, 2010
Google might start showing you results that from members of a specific group that you might be associated with such employee of your company or member of groups such as social clubs or fan club. The patent also covers real time result and how it might be associated with a google+ and how certain profile would more likely be showing up in real time search results based on several factors.
Abstract Of Patent
Methods, systems, and apparatus, including computer programs encoded on a computer storage medium, for detecting malicious system calls. In one aspect, a method includes identifying members of a social affinity group of the user, the social affinity group having members having a relationship to the user. The method includes receiving search results including search results that reference resources associated with members of the social affinity group. The method includes identifying a first search result that references the social network site. The method includes identifying a second search result that references a resource found on the social network site and associated with a member of the social affinity group. The method includes generating a response to the query comprising instructions that the first search result be presented in proximity to the second search result.
SEO Takeaway:
1- Google is giving reputation score to profiles and use the profile score to influence search rankings.
#1 – Context Sensitive Ranking
Inventors: Garg; Ashutosh (Sunnyvale, CA), Dhamdhere; Kedar (Sunnyvale, CA)
Filed: March 9, 2009
For many years there have been speculations on the web that Google might be using clickstream data to organize the search result pages. With this new patent granted to Google on June 26,2012 – the patent says how Google might be re-ranking search results based on the context of what you click the most.
This patent says how your clickstream data might be used to show you different searches in the future during a particular session, and re-reank search results based on your click history. The new results will be biased based on the statistic associated with the search results.
Abstract Of Patent
Methods, systems, and apparatus, including computer program products, in which context can be used to rank search results. Context associated with a user session can be identified. A search query received during the user session can be used to identify a contextual click model based upon the context associated with the user session.
SEO Takeaways:
1- Create your content based on the topic modeling concept so you will show your content based on the topic that users are most likely be interested to see. The most common and arguably the most useful for search engines is Latent Dirichlet Allocation, or LDA. This model mainly consist of clustering words into “topics.”
With these existing patents, our methodologies have evolved into a sleek and fast acting process that delivers results. Contact us now to experience our services!
