In a patent filed by Yahoo a few years back, (and excellently uncovered and covered by Bill Slawski) signals for success include site engagement metrics and a recognition of user interaction as a key metric to measuring satisfaction.
Update/Correction: Bill Slawski of SEO by the Sea has pointed out to us that the ComputerWorld article is actually based on Google News ranking signals from 2003. As Slawski's "The Traditional News Agency is Dead (On Google News)" points out:
For instance, today, if you search on Google for "what does Bill Slawski say about patents? But those results will simply be documents that contain terms such as "Bill Slawski", "patents" and "say". Ask a question like "Does Bill Cosby come from a...
Bill Slawski wrote an excellent post on a patent for a method of detecting commercial queries, secured by Google in October 2011. Slawski points out that a sentence near the end of the patent application opens the process up for uses on other...
Get beyond the links (good videos here and here with Bill Slawski). Do you guys think that general web directories are still good for building links, or should I go with niche directories, instead? Oh and this isn’t the only person asking.
As for potential social signals that could be used for search rankings, Bill Slawski highlighted a post about Google's acquisition of some Groupivity/Appmail patents. Slawski said he's been "a little wary of correlation studies because they...
Note: there have been some updates to the original PageRank patent, which Bill Slawski covers in detail here. Whenever I'm asked about what I do for a living, I say something like this: "you know those pieces of text that you can click on inside of...
Bill Slawski even speculates that the tilde could go the way of the + search operator. Have you ever used the tilde operator in your link prospecting? For beginning link prospectors, the tilde (~) is the "synonym" operator.
Bill Slawski offers a dozen possible methods that might have changed, including local interconnectivity, anchor text indexing, and cross-language information retrieval. Changes to local search results topped Google’s monthly recap of search and...
From patent analysis to viewing "what may be", Bill Slawski does a bang-up job of summarizing the areas many of us get glassy-eyed thinking about. On top of that, every day I get requests from people to test or review new resources, think up ideas...
Bill Slawski, president of SEO by the Sea, explained to us his SOPA concerns and what it could mean for marketers. One of my biggest concerns under SOPA is that it would create a private cause of action for anyone who might feel that their...
According to a blog post by Bill Slawski at SEO By the Sea that references US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) filings, IBM has agreed to give Google 188 granted patents and another 29 pending patent applications.
Bill Slawski found a patent granted last week that explores a few different ways Google might use human raters to evaluate which algorithmic changes might produce the best results. PotPieGirl, the blogger who found the original manual, did some...
And everyone's favorite (search) patent uber-geek Bill Slawski also found this one: Document Scoring Based on Document Content Update. Recently the folks over at Google had a new algo tweak that once more sought to be faster and more relevant to...
Bill Slawski first raised questions about the purpose of the patent September 27. The same Australian who blew the whistle on Facebook tracking logged out users last week discovered yesterday that although Facebook had “fixed” the problem, the...
As reported by Bill Slawski, a patent filed by Facebook in February of this year described a technology that "may access a cookie on the user's computer, where the cookie is associated with the social network" and "the third party website and the...
The description doesn’t quite match up 100%, but most patent descriptions are illustrative examples, and the claims sections are the important parts,” wrote Bill Slawski. Google has bought 12 patents relating to “cross-referencing information...
Bill Slawski has also analyzed the Microsoft Patent for Image Rankings (thanks to @mongoosemetrics for sharing this oldie-but-goodie hyperlink). If you're looking for a picture of a certain bird, for example, and perhaps can't remember the exact...
Patrick Altoft and Bill Slawski have both previously written about a Google patent application showing how a search engine can identify inadequate search content based on statistics associated with search queries and then share this information...
For those interested learning about more theoretical possibilities in assessing link value, I would strongly recommend Bill Slawski's analysis of Google's 2004 "Ranking documents based on user behavior and/or feature data.
