22 September 2006 | Author: C. Philip

Do patents reflect SEO gold?

The recent Search Engine Strategies conference observed a debate regarding whether or not white papers and patents published by search engine employees provide the clearest and most accurate reflection of SEO practice.



The Search Engines Strategies
conference is a much celebrated and world renowned conference which grows in attendance each year. This year's event, held in San Jose during the early days of August, had a number of intriguing SEO oriented points of discussion on the menu, and among them was a particularly zesty debate concerning the authenticity of white papers.

Academic papers and patents are generally written by software engineers and other search engine staff, in turn they're monitored by budding optimisers who usually use this documentation as proof that their methodologies help web pages rank. However, according to many representatives at the Search Engines Strategies conference, patent applications have the potential to offer strictly limited, and even misleading information.

Jon Glick, Senior Director of Product Search and Comparison Shopping at Become.com, and a panellist at this years Search Engines Strategies event said:

"What search engines put into patents is often more like brainstorming...it's every approach that they can think of versus what they are actually doing, or even have a technology to do."

Search engine staff often file patents with the notion that they might utilise certain features in the future. However, they prevent their competitors from utilising these features in the meantime. And what's more, publishers of the patents are very aware that a good percentage of their applications will be read by competitors and SEO companies. At the conference, Glick went on to outline the fact that, in his own words: "you don't actually have to use the features in the patent to be granted a patent, nor does anyone have to disclose all features in a patent application".

This suggests that when looking at patents and white papers, one should always bear in mind that the descriptions may encompass things that will never happen. However, some items in such patent applications may prove to be useful, especially with respect to external optimisation of websites - examples include out-link evaluation and link change frequency.

Although there is a grey area functioning in the relationship between patents and 'true SEO gold,' the constant evolution of search engine algorithms certainly allows for various benefits among optimisers. We all know that development in this industry evolves at a continuous, breakneck rate, and it is now apparent that search engines are doing more than ever to gain a better understanding of what the content on pages actually means. Looking a few years back, engines were blindly indexing the words on a web page, but now they are actually implementing processes to understand those words - and therefore to comprehend what the relevant pages represent. For example, a number like (0131) 555-8165 can now be recognised as a phone number.

Moving into the future of search and optimisation, optimisers should continue to practice the monitoring of patent applications, white papers, and other publications that are authored by search engine software engineers. This will provide an additional guide in the ongoing mission of maximising website exposure, but must certainly will never be used as proof.

So what is the secret ingredient to maximum search exposure? Well, at bigmouthmedia, we act coy and tend to keep things like that under our hats. We can, however, assure all our readers that our hats are - as they always have and will be - white!

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