What’s the latest SEO misconception that you would like to put to rest?

Matt's answer:

MALE SPEAKER: Today’s question comes from Dublin, Ireland. The question is, what’s the latest SEO misconception that you’d like to put to rest? Oh, good one. There’s a sort of persistent misconception that people often have, which is just because a patent issues that has somebody’s name on it, or someone who works at Search Quality, or someone who works at Google, that doesn’t necessarily mean that we are using that patent at that moment. So sometimes you’ll see speculation. Google had a patent where they mentioned using the length of time that a domain was registered. That doesn’t mean that we’re necessarily doing that. It just means that that mechanism is patented. Somebody else at Google had gotten a patent on the idea– or the mechanism, not just the idea, the actual implementation– by which you could look at how people had changed their web page after an update, and basically say, oh these are people who are responding to Google or they are dynamically SEOing their stuff. And so there were a lot of publishers who were like, I’m just going to throw up my hands. Why bother at all if Google’s just going to keep an eye? And if we change, then Google’s realizing that, and monitoring that, and changing their ranking in response. And it’s the sort of thing where just because that patent comes out doesn’t mean that Google’s currently using that technology. So patents are a lot of interesting ideas. So you can see a lot of stuff mentioned in them. But don’t take it as an automatic golden truth that we’re doing any particular thing that is mentioned in a patent.

by Matt Cutts - Google's Head of Search Quality Team

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