Bill Slawski
Bill Slawski can be found online at:
Twitter: bill_slawski
GooglePlus: https://plus.google.com/+BillSlawski
With more than 20 years of SEO experience and a Juris Doctor Degree, Bill is the foremost expert on Google’s patents as related to SEO. Bill is the Editor of SEO by the Sea, a prominent search engine optimization blog, where he is the author of over 1,000 posts.
Bill’s experience includes Fortune 500 brands and some of the largest websites in the world. Bill is a contributing author for Moz and Search Engine Land. In 2014-2016, he spoke at industry leading conferences about topics including search engine algorithms, universal and blended search, personalization in search, search and social, and duplicate content problems, structured data and schema
Disambiguating Search Input Based On Context of Input
“Hey Google; New York, New York!” Google hears a query for “New York, New York.” Does it give directions, play a Frank Sinatra Song, or show tourist style search results? Likely that depends upon the context of that query. As we are told in a Google patent: User input can be identified as ambiguous for […]
How Google Built Machine Learning into their Job Search Engine
I’ve had some people ask me recently why I think it is important to share patents that describe things that a search engine might offer. The legal purpose behind a patent is to give a patent holder a chance to exclude others from using the same process as them and keep others from infringing upon […]
Google Granted Patent for “Predicting a User’s Needs for a Particular Context”
Stop Guessing Query Terms Usually, when someone uses a search engine, they enter search query terms or a question into a search box. A Patent granted to Google suggests alternatives to “guessing search terms” to try to obtain “information necessary to achieve a particular goal.” This patent came to my attention as one I wanted […]
My Fifth Post About Context at Google: Adding Context Facts to Question Answers
Context Facts Tell Us How Entities are Related Google provides an example of how a site can use context information in a new patent that tells us about context facts. This post is about putting facts into context, and I feel like I need to point out other posts I have written about context at […]
Answering Questions with Structured Data
Only the Facts, Fast Back in 2005, The Official Google Blog published a post called, Just the Facts, Fast. Recently, Google has been showing single result answers to queries that has captured a lot of attention in posts such as, Zero-Result SERPs: Welcome to the Future We Should’ve Known Was Coming. Showing just one answer […]
SEO Moves From Keywords to Ontologies and Query Patterns
From Keywords to Ontologies When we ask Google, “How tall is Barack Obama,” we aren’t searching for pages that match certain keywords, but instead factual information about the person who was the 44th US President. The types of searches we are performing, and the ways that search engines are collecting information and indexing it, and […]
Google Changes How they Understand Place Names in a Knowledge Graph
Place Names in the Knowledge Graph Before Google had a Knowledge Graph, it had built a Fact Repository. Google had filed a patent for their Browseable Fact Repository in 2006, and I wrote about that patent in a post titled, Google’s Browseable Fact Repository – an Early Knowledge Graph. One of the co-inventors of the […]
Related Entity Scores in Knowledge Based Searches
“The perfect search engine would understand exactly what you mean and give you back exactly what you want.” Larry Page, How Search Works Using Knowledge Bases to Answer Queries about Entities Three years ago, I wrote How Knowledge Base Entities can be Used in Searches about how you could search using a query such as, […]
How Google May Determine Similar Local Entities
Local Search is Filled with Local Entities Having Local Significance Google’s Local Search is more semantic-based than their organic search; where businesses are often referred to as “local entities,” like in a patent that was granted to Google on January 2 of 2018. It’s more of a consideration of different things (as in “Things and […]
Google Shows Us Context is King When Indexing People
Context is King Sometimes, you’ll see someone writing about SEO say that “Content is King”. But when I see that, I’m often tempted to respond with, “Context is king.” The right words at the right time meeting the intent of someone searching can fulfill their informational or even situational needs. When you write a page, […]