Why are so many of your posts so often about patents and whitepapers?
When a search engine applies for a patent, they aren’t creating a document that is intended to market an invention they are making. Instead, they are applying to the government for legal protection for their invention. The patent is intended to give someone with knowledge in the field of the invention an idea of what the invention covers, but it’s not a roadmap on how to create, or recreate the invention step-by-step.
While the patent is often filled with legal language, it’s also often filled with assumptions about the Web, about search, and about searchers. I usually summarize a patent when I write about it, provide a link to it so that people can read it for themselves, and provide some of my own thoughts and analysis from the perspective of a searcher, a web site owner, and a search engine optimizer.
Instead of arguing about the validity of patents, i prefer to instead write about them, the business approaches behind them and the technology to learn as much as possible from them. Just because a search engine has a patent on an invention doesn’t mean that they are currently using it. The search engine may have technical or business reasons why they aren’t, or have decided to follow a different approach.
What is SEO?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is marketing that takes into consideration the framework of the Web, how people find things on the Web (often through search engines), how information flows through the Web (through social networks and decentralized networks such as blogs, and media channels).
I’ve been promoting sites in the Web since the mid 90s before AltaVista and Google were around. I was a forum moderator and administrator for almost a decade in a forum focused on promoting sites, helping small to medium sized businesses, and doing SEO and usability for sites, and improving conversions and design.
I’ve provided SEO services to non-profits, to universities, to Fortune 500s, and to mom and pop ecommerce businesses.
Why do you have a category on SEO Mythology?
There’s an old saying that one of the best places to learn about the Web is on the Web itself. There’s a lot of great information on the internet, but there’s also a lot of great misinformation. SEO has been around for awhile, though some of its history is shrouded in mystery.
I’ve also run into articles and blog posts and practices that are more mythology or folklore than useful and helpful practices and I wanted to discuss those and the history behind them if possible.
I’ve seen people create content and pages and infographics that were less intended to provide good information and more intended to attract as many links as possible (content often referred to as linkbait)
Rather than getting aggravated whenever I see such content and how it might hurt and mislead people, I decided to create a category on my blog that dispelled or punctured that kind of misinformation.