Bill Slawski
Bill Slawski can be found online at:
Twitter: bill_slawski
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/slawski/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/bill.slawski
With more than 23 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 1,200 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 2014-2019, 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
Contextual Knowledge Panels at Google
Just What is a Contextual Knowledge Panel? SEO doesn’t come with an instruction manual – it would be easier if it did. But for some things we just don’t know all the rules about how they work, such as knowledge panels. We do sometimes get some hints from places like patents, and one that was […]
How Google May Do Query Rewriting by Looking at a Searcher’s Prior Queries
How Many People does Mudville Stadium (where Mighty Casey Struck Out) hold? Google was granted a new patent involving an approach to query rewriting earlier this week. It works a little differently than Google’s Hummingbird or Google’s Rankbrain. We’ve seen patents that use approaches involving rewriting queries that searchers may search with that may return […]
How Google May Interpret An Ambiguous Query Using a Semantic Interpretation
Ambiguous Queries and Semantic Interpretations When someone asks an ambiguous query at Google, how does it go about responding to that query? It may start off by trying to understand the intent behind the query, to interpret what might have been meant by the person who entered that ambiguous query and finding the right words […]
Quality Visit Scores to Businesses May Influence Rankings in Google Local Search
You can learn a lot on the Web about businesses, such as the addresses of those businesses, categories related to them, reviews that may reveal a lot of information, even stuff that a business may not have wanted to share online. Local directories can provide very detailed information about businesses too, such as the address, […]
Ranking Search Results and Product Queries
Ranking Search Results for Product Queries vs. Accessory Queries Many eCommerce sites on the Web carry products and accessories for sale online. A Google patent tells us how the search engine might distinguish between the two, and rank product queries higher than accessories queries. The patent tells us about the problem caused by information like […]
A Crowdsourcing Evaluation of Clustered Search Results
A Google Patent focusing upon ranking software applications using clustering and a crowdsourcing evaluation approach to choose the best-clustered search results was just granted. The crowdsourcing evaluation would be supplied by sources such as Mechanical Turk. In addition to being used for software applications, this approach is also intended to apply to: Products sold in […]
Do Searchers Find Value in User-Generated Content Search Results?
Is there potential value in answering questions at a site like Quora? Will your answers be found and appreciated by people? How Do Search Engines feel about User-Generated Content Search Results from Sources such as a Quora or Stack Exchange or Reddit? User Generated Content Search Results Twitter Poll I asked at Twitter if people […]
Question Answering Explaining Estimates of Missing Facts
Will Google Start Explaining Estimates in Search Results? We’ve been seeing an increase in the number of answers that Google shows for questions that searchers ask in Google’s search box. And Google has made statements about wanting to answer such questions, which I wrote about in When Google Started Showing Direct Answers, which points out […]
Google Media Consumption History Tracking
If you use Google Maps for navigation, Google may track a mobile location history for you about the places you travel to. A patent granted to Google at the end of last month describes a media consumption history that Google may use to track information about the media you consume (concerts attended, TV shows and […]
Semantic Frames and Word Embeddings at Google
Using Semantic Frames to Add Context to Word Embeddings Word Embeddings are a way for Google to look at text, whether a short tweet or query, or a page, or a site, and understand the words in those better. It can understand when a word or a sentence could be added, which is how query […]