Bill S. posted an article on SEO by the SEA - Feb 6, 2012, 10:42 am
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 searc...
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Bill S. posted an article on SEO by the SEA - Feb 3, 2012, 2:46 pm
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 b...
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Bill S. posted an article on SEO by the SEA - Feb 1, 2012, 10:55 am
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
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Bill S. posted an article on SEO by the SEA - Jan 29, 2012, 10:44 am
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, wh...
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Bill S. posted an article on SEO by the SEA - Jan 26, 2012, 3:30 pm
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 re...
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Bill S. posted an article on SEO by the SEA - Jan 23, 2012, 10:36 am
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
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Bill S. posted an article on SEO by the SEA - Dec 14, 2011, 10:10 am
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
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Bill S. posted an article on SEO by the SEA - Dec 12, 2011, 11:42 am
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 k...
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Bill S. posted an article on SEO by the SEA - Dec 11, 2011, 12:58 pm
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
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Bill S. posted an article on SEO by the SEA - Dec 9, 2011, 10:18 am
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 ...
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Bill S. posted an article on SEO by the SEA - Dec 7, 2011, 2:45 am
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 ha...
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Bill S. posted an article on SEO by the SEA - Dec 5, 2011, 10:16 am
If you’ve never used Twitter before, it can be a little intimidating when you’re first starting out. You’re faced with a message on the front page of the site telling you to “Follow your interests,” and promising “instant updates from your friends, industry experts, favorite celebrities,...
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Bill S. posted an article on SEO by the SEA - Nov 28, 2011, 1:15 pm
Are you a robot? A spammer? A sock puppet? A trusted author and content developer? A trusted agent in the eyes of Google? (More on trusted agents below.) When you interact on a social network, or write a review online or update information to an internet mapping service, how much does the service ...
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Bill S. posted an article on SEO by the SEA - Nov 23, 2011, 9:08 pm
A number of years back, I remember being humbled by a homework assignment crayon drawing by a friend’s son which listed what he was thankful for, and included his parents, his sister, and shoes that Thanksgiving. We take so much for granted that we should be thankful that we have. A few friends an...
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Bill S. posted an article on SEO by the SEA - Nov 1, 2011, 4:28 am
Sometimes when you search at Google, you might not find any results that you find interesting and may search again using a somewhat similar query. Chances are that you don’t want to see the same sites or pages all over again. A newly granted patent from Google describes how the search engine might...
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Bill S. posted an article on SEO by the SEA - Oct 27, 2011, 3:27 pm
You go to a site that you’ve enjoyed and bookmarked sometime in the past but haven’t visited in a while, and it’s changed. The topics it discusses are different, or the writing style isn’t quite the same, or it suddenly has links within its content to commercial pages that it probably wouldn...
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Bill S. posted an article on SEO by the SEA - Oct 25, 2011, 8:33 am
One question I’m sometimes asked by people is about whether or not they should choose a domain name that includes the name of their business or brand, or if they should use keywords within a domain name to make it easier for them to rank for those keywords in Google and the other search
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Bill S. posted an article on SEO by the SEA - Oct 24, 2011, 1:55 pm
When search engines return web pages in search results in response to a query, most people assume that the pages being show are the ones that a search engine has decided are the “best” pages in response to their search terms. But what does the word “best” mean in that context? The search eng...
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Bill S. posted an article on SEO by the SEA - Oct 21, 2011, 10:41 am
Can patents be said to have family histories? If so, this post is going to introduce a barely known ancestor to one of the most written about search related patents on the Web, as well as a brand new grandchild to the patent. The patent is Google’s Information retrieval based on historical data, ...
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Bill S. posted an article on SEO by the SEA - Oct 19, 2011, 11:06 am
How much does feedback from searchers impact the search results that we see at Bing or Google? How do those search engines process and respond to that feedback? The links that Google and Bing present for searchers to provide feedback on search results are listed at the bottoms of the search results...
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Bill S. posted an article on SEO by the SEA - Oct 14, 2011, 3:43 pm
I hadn’t heard the term “Bounce Pad” being referred to websites before, but it’s useful knowing the language of search engines, and the things they might look for when crawling and indexing webpages, and serving results to searchers. Determining whether a site is a bounce pad involves an ana...
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Bill S. posted an article on SEO by the SEA - Oct 11, 2011, 1:36 pm
Earlier this year, Google acquired the patents of a real time search engine started in 2009, Wowd (a play on the word “crowd.”) Wowd had no web crawlers, but rather relied upon users downloading a browser application, so that every page they visited was nominated to be included in search results...
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Bill S. posted an article on SEO by the SEA - Oct 10, 2011, 12:36 pm
A new patent filing from Yahoo raises the question, “How much has social media influenced the expectations of searchers, and forced search engines to change?” Before I can begin to even think about that, I have to ask if looking at Yahoo patents even a good idea after their 2009 deal with Micro...
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Bill S. posted an article on SEO by the SEA - Oct 7, 2011, 11:43 am
I love local search. It follows many practices similar to Web search, though different often in ways that do reflect an attempt to map the real world. Google’s Streetview cars are a little like Google’s webcrawler Googlebot, and instead of collecting URLs for Websites, Google Maps collects addre...
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Bill S. posted an article on SEO by the SEA - Oct 5, 2011, 11:03 am
Might Google start providing more link options in Google Instant Previews as a result of this acquisition? A company that filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Google in 2007,on the day that their last patent was granted, has now assigned all of their patents to Google. The flowchart below is...
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Bill S. posted an article on SEO by the SEA - Oct 4, 2011, 12:21 am
Google seems to be making a regular habit of acquiring patents from IBM, with a new acquisition of 39 granted patents and two pending patent applications on September 30th, recorded at the USPTO today. Like the earlier transactions this year of 1,030 patents tranferred in May, and 1,023 patents assi...
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Bill S. posted an article on SEO by the SEA - Oct 3, 2011, 1:15 pm
One of the things that’s clear about how search engines work is that when they find a link pointing to a page using certain anchor text, that page might be seen to be a little more relevant for the text found in that link. Google pointed that out in one of the earliest white
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Bill S. posted an article on SEO by the SEA - Sep 28, 2011, 10:44 pm
In July, Google launched a beta version of their Page Speed Service, which collects content from your pages on the fly, and republishes it on a proxy, rewritten in a manner that should provide faster pages. Search Engine Watch wrote about this proxy service on July 29, 2011, and Adam Hopkinson in th...
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Bill S. posted an article on SEO by the SEA - Sep 28, 2011, 1:39 pm
It’s a tangled web when it comes to patent acqusitions and infringement lawsuits, and a scorecard isn’t enough to keep track of the all of the businesses involved and the nature of their relationships with one another, as a recent acquisition of patents by Google from Mosaid Technologies illustr...
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Bill S. posted an article on SEO by the SEA - Sep 27, 2011, 10:01 am
Is Facebook targeting conventional and social ads to the social network’s users and their connections, based upon visits to pages outside of Facebook that show Facebook widgets or use Facebook tracking pixels, while the Facebook users are logged out of Facebook? On Sunday, Australian tech develop...
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Bill S. posted an article on SEO by the SEA - Sep 26, 2011, 11:14 am
I read a novel not long ago, Rainbow’s End by Vernor Vinge, that suggested that in the future one of the most popular technology positions would be that of software archeologist, with development and programming skills capable of digging through many lines of code to decipher where they originated...
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Bill S. posted an article on SEO by the SEA - Sep 20, 2011, 9:42 am
When you try to gauge how effective your website is, you may decide upon certain metrics to measure its impact. Those may differ based upon the objectives of your pages, but could include things like how many orders you receive for products you might offer, how many phone calls you receive inquiring...
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Bill S. posted an article on SEO by the SEA - Sep 14, 2011, 2:21 am
In what feels like a case of deja vu, Google has recorded the acquisition of at least 1,022 patents from International Business Machines in August of this year (there’s a 1,023rd patent listed in the USTPO assignment database as well, but the patent number appears to be wrong). The USPTO recording...
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Bill S. posted an article on SEO by the SEA - Sep 13, 2011, 2:11 pm
I may have been a little unusual as an English major in my college days. I remember one professor asking me what I found interesting about a particular author we were studying, and my answer was about patterns involving the language that he used, and how he tended to frequently use certain words tha...
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Bill S. posted an article on SEO by the SEA - Sep 12, 2011, 10:22 am
My little town of Warrenton, Virginia, started off life not as a destination, but rather as a convenient stopping point between other destinations. In the late 1700s, it had a road running through it between Falmouth, a port town on the Rappahanock River, and Winchester, an early European settlement...
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Bill S. posted an article on SEO by the SEA - Sep 8, 2011, 11:49 am
A new patent application from Apple describes how they might incorporate user information data into ranking locations in their map application searches. This probably has some implications for businesses that rely upon services like Google Maps and Google Place pages to bring visitors to their shops...
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Bill S. posted an article on SEO by the SEA - Sep 6, 2011, 11:52 am
I recently participated in the creation of a book about SEO named Critical Thinking for the Discerning SEO, where Sheldon Campbell, also known as Doc Sheldon, asked 31 internet marketers a series of questions about internet work focusing upon how critical thinking plays a role in what they do. One o...
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Bill S. posted an article on SEO by the SEA - Sep 4, 2011, 6:23 pm
Google was recently assigned a number of unusual and interesting patents from Outland Research, LLC, from inventor Louis B. Rosenberg, a Stanford PhD, Cal Polytech Professor on leave, and most recently professional film maker. A number of Rosenberg’s inventions have been developed into commercial ...
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Bill S. posted an article on SEO by the SEA - Sep 1, 2011, 1:47 pm
When you look at web page search results for a Web search, there are usually three important elements displayed for each page. One is the page title, which also acts as a link to the page. Another is the URL of the page, which sometimes gives you a hint of what you might find
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Bill S. posted an article on SEO by the SEA - Aug 30, 2011, 3:13 am
It’s not related to search, or to SEO, but it’s one of the more unusual and interesting patents that I’ve seen come out of Google in a while, and Google Founder Sergey Brin is listed as one of the co-inventors. Google was granted a patent today on a device that could allow someone to
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Bill S. posted an article on SEO by the SEA - Aug 26, 2011, 10:28 am
Google’s web search results have gone through a number of transformations over the years, from the additions of images and maps and videos and other kinds of results from Google’s vertical search respositories, to an autocomplete dropdown of query refinement suggestions and automatically updatin...
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Bill S. posted an article on SEO by the SEA - Aug 23, 2011, 8:08 am
Might Google lower the rankings of a page in search results if it detects unusual patterns related to clicks on advertisements on that page, or might Google use a ranking algorithm that can be tested against such unusual click patterns to lower the rankings of pages in search results? A Google paten...
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Bill S. posted an article on SEO by the SEA - Aug 22, 2011, 10:35 am
Many sites on the Web contain elements that change on a regular basis, from advertisements that differ everytime a page shows, to widgets that contain constantly updated information, to blog and news homepages that show new posts and articles hourly or daily or weekly. Ecommerce sites add and remove...
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Bill S. posted an article on SEO by the SEA - Aug 18, 2011, 7:12 pm
My Google toolbar updated on me earlier today, and a notification window popped up, telling me about one of Google’s newest features, Google Related, which has some interesting implications. Ran Ben-Yair, a Product Manager from the Google Related team located at the Israel R&D Center introduced th...
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Bill S. posted an article on SEO by the SEA - Aug 18, 2011, 10:52 am
When you write a post at Google Plus, the social network allows you to link a web page and display an image from that page to the post, as well as defining who your post should be seen by. A patent filing published last week describes some of the processes behind adding those features,
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Bill S. posted an article on SEO by the SEA - Aug 14, 2011, 3:27 pm
This past February, Google filed for a number of patents that describe aspects of how it might share information from one data center to another, and some of the challenges that entails. Google’s Yonatan Zunber, who revealed on his blog that over the past few months that he was the chief architect...
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Bill S. posted an article on SEO by the SEA - Aug 12, 2011, 11:19 am
Imagine that Google assigns categories to every webpage or website that it visits. You can see categories like those for sites in Google’s local search. Now imagine that Google has looked through how frequently certain keywords appear on the pages of those websites, how often those pages rank for ...
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Bill S. posted an article on SEO by the SEA - Aug 11, 2011, 2:17 pm
Google’s not the only business that’s been driving around making videos of the streets of the United States. Facet Technology, which lists Bing as one of their technology partners, does something similar and offers navigation and location based services data and software. Back in 2009, Facet Tec...
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Bill S. posted an article on SEO by the SEA - Aug 11, 2011, 10:34 am
Will Facebook someday launch their own search engine that enables you to search the Web? That question surfaces every so often, without any real definitive answers. It’s possible that they might someday, especially since they’ve been hiring a number of people with job experience from some of the...
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Bill S. posted an article on SEO by the SEA - Aug 8, 2011, 12:55 pm
Imagine that you want to find a pair of vintage Levi’s jeans for sale on the Web. You go to Google and enter the search terms
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