In a previous post I covered SEO and how Social Media may impact it. Talking about Google, brand authority, co-citation as it relates to non-link mentions of a brand, with a colleague of mine, Patrick Troy, he pointed out that MOZ had had a great post on a recent patent filed by Google. This patent is being taken as evidence that they are using non linking brand mentions as “implied links”.

The post, The Panda Patent: Brand Mentions Are the Future of Link Building, by Simon Penson, dives “into that patent and other supporting evidence in an attempt to understand what the opportunity may be for digital marketers in the future. As part of that attempt, we offer our interpretation of various pieces of the patent itself, and also look at actual data to see if mentions are already playing a part in the ranking of sites.”

Google has always said content is king. Tie the eventual total elimination of access to organic keywords in Google Analytics with this patent and we see Google taking another step in pushing sites to produce not “keyword rich” but rather quality content. Not quite ready to announce “the king is dead, long live the king” but we may have just taken a big step forward in Google being able to search the web semantically.

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