Bill Slawski posted about a new Google patent application filed in August of 2018 that was just revealed last week named Website Representation Vector to Generate Search Results and Classify Website. This patent can explain a lot around the August 2018 Medic update theories out there.

Here is the abstract of the patent:

In short, this describes how Google can classify the type of web site and then use that to assign maybe different weights to rankings. Bill explained:

The specific patent document says the “scores may be specific for a particular knowledge domain. For instance, the website classification system 120 can determine multiple queries for a particular knowledge domain within a set of multiple knowledge domains. Some example knowledge domains include artificial intelligence, education, astronomy, and health.” In fact, it mentions health, doctors, and medical/medicine over ten times but there is no mention of finance or money – although, it really doesn’t matter.

It is pretty facisinating to read this and look back at the theories around E-A-T, YMYL and of course the Medic Update in August 2018, the same time this patent was filed. Of course, Google has said just because Google has a patent, it doesn’t mean they use it.

Here are some tweets from the industry:

Forum discussion at Twitter.