Understanding SEO Patents To Optimize Your Efforts

SEO (search engine optimization) is a constantly evolving field, driven by technological advancements and the ever-changing algorithms of search engines like Google, Microsoft’s Bing, and others. One crucial but often overlooked area in SEO is the analysis of SEO patents. These patents offer insights into the strategies search engines use to rank content and prioritize certain aspects of websites. By understanding SEO patents, you can gain an edge over your competitors by aligning your strategies with the core ideas and concepts that search engines prioritize.

In this article, we will dive into the concept of SEO patents, the companies that hold significant patents, and how reading these patents can benefit your SEO efforts.

What Are SEO Patents?

SEO patents are legal documents filed by companies like Google, Microsoft, and others to protect their innovations in search technology. These patents cover a wide range of topics, from ranking algorithms and machine learning processes to user behavior analysis and content relevance. They outline how search engines evaluate websites and determine which pages will rank higher in the search results.

By studying these patents, you can uncover the foundational technologies that influence modern search engine behavior and apply this knowledge to optimize websites more effectively.

The information unveiled by these patents can either be focused on the more technical aspects of SEO, on-page SEO, off-page SEO, or even just the inner workings of search engines as a whole.

What Types of SEO Patents Are There?

The types of SEO patents are diverse and can vary widely based on the aspect of SEO they cover and which company filed the patent (as all search engines are slightly different). While most patents relate to ranking algorithms, user intent, and search relevance, different companies have their own areas of specialization. Let’s explore the key players in the SEO patent landscape.

Google

Google is the undisputed leader in search technology, with thousands of patents related to its algorithms. Key patents like PageRank, which evaluates the importance of web pages based on their link structure, form the backbone of Google’s ranking system. Google also holds patents for RankBrain (a machine learning-based ranking system) and BERT (for understanding natural language queries). Understanding Google's patents allows SEO professionals to grasp the core mechanisms that influence Google’s search rankings.

Microsoft

Microsoft’s Bing search engine also holds numerous SEO-related patents, many of which focus on content quality prediction and personalized search. Bing’s approach to ranking combines traditional ranking factors with insights from user behavior and content quality. Microsoft’s patents often emphasize the importance of multimedia search, voice search, and user intent, areas that are becoming increasingly significant in SEO.

Yahoo

Although Yahoo now uses Bing’s search engine, it still holds several important SEO patents from its earlier days as a major search engine. These patents focus on link-based ranking algorithms and advertising relevance. Yahoo’s contribution to SEO patents includes innovations in user behavior analysis and content filtering, which still influence modern SEO practices.

IBM

IBM may not be a search engine company, but it holds patents related to natural language processing (NLP) and cognitive computing. With the rise of AI and conversational search, IBM’s patents on Watson and its NLP capabilities offer insights into how search engines may evolve. These technologies are essential for voice search, chatbot optimization, and complex query handling.

Patents Show You How Search Engines Understand Relationships Between Entities

Search engines have advanced beyond keyword matching and now focus on understanding the relationships between entities. The increasing sophistication of search algorithms and machine learning models drives this evolution. These patents often highlight the methods used to help search engines connect entities and concepts, providing more accurate and contextually relevant results. By reading patents (especially Google’s patents) you’ll have a better grasp on how you can help search engines understand your content. If they can more easily understand your content, you will always rank higher in search, because you are therefore proving that you are providing higher quality content.

NLP (Natural Language Processing)

Google, Microsoft, and IBM hold a variety of patents on natural language processing (NLP), a technology that allows search engines to understand the context and meaning behind user queries. Patents related to semantic search, entity recognition, and language understanding help search engines grasp the relationships between entities mentioned in content. If you want to create content that ranks then focusing on these concepts is important. Creating content that aligns with these concepts makes it easier for search engines to extract meaning and relevance. The easier you make it for algorithms to extract meaning and relevance, the higher you will rank.

LLM (Large Language Models)

Large Language Models (LLMs) like Google's BERT have dramatically changed how search engines process language. These models are trained on vast amounts of text data, enabling them to understand complex sentence structures and user intent. Google holds patents that describe how these models are used to rank content and understand relationships between entities, queries, and topics. Understanding these patents can help you tailor your content to better match search engine capabilities, especially in producing highly relevant and readable content. By creating content based on what these patents reveal, you’ll also be creating content that is more easily understood by users because both algorithms and users alike appreciate explicit, straightforward content.

Structured Data

Patents related to structured data focus on how search engines process and interpret data that is clearly labeled and organized. Google’s structured data patents, for example, provide insight into how schema markup helps the search engine identify key elements of a page (such as events, products, reviews, etc.). Implementing structured data not only improves search visibility but also enhances the way search engines understand the relationships between different entities on a page.

Benefits From Reading SEO Patents

While patents may seem like complex legal documents, the insights they offer are invaluable for SEO. By studying SEO patents, you can gain a deeper understanding of the strategies that patents layout, and apply this knowledge to improve your content, website structure, and overall ranking potential.

Understanding How To Make Better Content

When reading SEO patents you’ll often see how they weigh certain aspects of content, and by understanding the different concepts behind these “weights” attributed to any given document (website) you’ll be able to better understand how to structure your content to make it easier for search engines and users alike. For instance, Google's patents related to content freshness, relevance, and user satisfaction offer clues about what content is likely to perform well. By understanding these criteria, you can craft content that not only meets user expectations but also aligns with search engine priorities.

Understanding What Search Engines Prioritize

Google, Bing, and other search engines have different priorities when it comes to ranking pages. SEO patents will reveal various concepts, content types, HTML elements, etc., that are considered ranking factors, and you can craft your content to align with those things accordingly. Google's focus on semantic search and natural language understanding, for example, highlights the importance of context over keyword density. Reading patents helps SEO professionals tailor their strategies to match these evolving priorities, ensuring that their content remains competitive.

Understanding How To Make Your Content More Relevant To Your Topic

SEO patents frequently discuss how search engines assess topic relevance. For instance, patents that address topic modeling and entity recognition give insight into how search engines determine whether your content adequately covers the subject. This can guide you in producing content that is more in-depth, comprehensive, and directly relevant to user queries. By utilizing the information in these patents you’ll be able to ensure that your content is more relevant than any of your competitors. They may still outrank you based on their overall website, their backlink profile, the overall coverage of their domain, etc., but if you focus on creating quality content you will overtake them.

Understanding How To Structure Your Website

Search engines also prioritize how websites are structured. Patents related to crawl efficiency and site architecture can offer insights into the best ways to organize your website. This includes optimizing internal linking, URL structures, simplifying navigation, and ensuring your site is easily crawlable by search engines. 

Understanding How To Structure Your Articles

Patents related to on-page SEO factors provide valuable guidelines on how to structure articles for higher relevancy and therefore higher ranking. Google's patents on header tags, meta descriptions, and structured data offer insights into how content should be organized and presented to improve SEO performance. By reading the patents and gathering actionable steps, you can create content that is more likely to rank highly in search results.

Gaining Actionable Steps To Communicate More Effectively With Search Engines

By understanding how search engines interpret content, you can tailor your website to better communicate with these algorithms. By reading these patents you’ll have a better grasp on how search engines parse through content to understand context, relation to user’s queries, and more. Understanding these things will help you craft content that aligns more closely with what search engines expect to see in a webpage that deserves to rank. This improves your chances of ranking for rich snippets, featured snippets, and other SERP features.

How To Test The Information You Uncover In Patents

It’s not enough to read SEO patents, as not every patent is actively being used. To determine if the information you are uncovering in a patent is relevant for search today, you need to actively test the concepts you see. SEO is highly dynamic, and search engines constantly update their algorithms. By testing patent-derived strategies on your website, you can determine which patents are actively being used in search today.

To test which concepts are actively being used by search engines you can create a test website and implement the strategies you find and document any increases or decreases you see in your indexability, rankings, crawl budgets, and other important aspects of your website’s health and reputation in search.

Not Every Patent Is Actively Being Used

We mentioned it briefly in the last heading, but to drive this point further home - not every patent is actively being used by search engines. Some patents are just theoretical, some are outdated, and others are for things that were bypassed with different technologies (meaning developers took a different turn and no longer require the technology described by the patent). Therefore, it’s crucial to stay updated on the latest algorithm changes and industry news and to test patent-based strategies before fully integrating them into your SEO plan.