Page Rank Sculpting Patent Granted To Google

[morestar]

Happy Friday members of WebProWorld.com. Today I'm going to share an article written by Bill Swawski about a patent that was granted to Google related to Page Rank Sculpting - the patent's title is Embedded communication of link information.

Here's a quote:

Google filed for a patent in 2005 that could have transformed how we think about and use links, such as letting webmasters decide how much PageRank a link might pass along, or applying machine readable labels to links, indicating that some links might lead to “offensive” content (“offensive=very”) or “funny” information (“funny=somewhat”), or where on a page the destination of a link might appear, such as in a footer or main content area.

This looks like pretty big news. It looks like there's a possibility of hurting another's website through links?

The idea is to be able to add "opinion" to outbound links. So what effect could this have on Page Rank?

Is this patent something webmasters and SEOs should be looking into and expecting to be of significance with respect to the search results?

These are my questions...

[deepsand]

This is not about PageRank, which is a quantitative measure, but about a qualitative evaluation of links, the likes of which Google already does.

[mjtaylor]

I am a fan of Bill Slawski and I think his analyses are highly useful for understanding how Google "thinks" but it's hard to think there's big news in the award of a patent that was sought 6 years ago.

Now, it would be big news if the +1 button suddenly springs a text field that allows us to add a descriptive word.

And deep is right, this wouldn't affect PR, but it could certainly affect rank. My 2c says it isn't coming soon.

[deepsand]

... this wouldn't affect PR, but it could certainly affect rank. My 2c says it isn't coming soon.

Anything that relies on the voluntary cooperation of content providers isn't happening unless there's a clear benefit to be had by them.