Then again, I guess everything is good in moderation. If you don’t know about patents, you lose some. If you only study patents and nothing else, you will lose in other aspects of site optimization. But, if you cover all aspects of website optimization in your learning, you’ll be stout enough to work on a website.

Here is a piece on “What if Google algo was leaked?”

Rand’s artcile is intersting and he is right of course. SEO has moved into a more holisitic space, focusing on linkable content and usability, but much of that information could have been seen in the patents over the last few years. I wouldn’t sit there excessivley analyzing every patent looking for a secret. However if I saw a handful of patents talking about determining relevancy from user traffic patterns I’d pay more attention to the traffic patterns on my site.

Patent watch isn’t meant as a cure all, but it can reveal some about what the search engines are thinking about.