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You Know that Not All SEO Patents Are In Use, Right? - Summary Episode #4
In this episode we welcome Hubspot’s Victor Pan who rants all about:
The various reason why an SEO-related patent might exist
The fallacy in assuming all Google SEO patents are active
Why thinking Google’s patents are there to throw us off is incredibly stupid
How to Approach Google’s SEO Patents
According to Victor, there’s more than meets the eye when it comes to Google’s patents. We often take these patents as gospel in that we assume Google uses them. However, there are multiple reasons why a company would create a patent. Forget the fact that the patent might not be in use or not… companies often create patents as part of their business strategy.
Google, and companies like it, use patents to prevent the competition from acquiring a technology, etc. Meaning, the patent you assume Google is using might just be there so as to prevent Bing from using that methodology. Thus, there’s a clear danger in automatically thinking every Google patent speaks to what’s happening in the algorithm.
That said, putting a patent out there does expose Google. How? It shows the competition where they might be headed and what they are interested in, or what problems they are trying to solve. All things being equal, a company does want to use the technology in their patents.
Meaning, the idea that Google is just throwing patents out there as some sort of SEO conspiracy to throw us off makes absolutely no sense.