A recently granted patent named ranking documents can be looked at as if it was a Penguin patent or maybe a patent on how to trick SEOs into thinking their pages are ranking or maybe both.

Bill Slawski, the SEO patent guru, wrote about it at his blog titled The Google Rank-Modifying Spammers Patent. Tedster also has a good summary of Bill’s summary at WebmasterWorld.

In short, the patent discusses finding spam such as keyword stuffing, invisible text, tiny text, page redirects, meta tags stuffing, and link-based manipulation.

It also discusses how to fake the search rankings without changing the search rankings. Tedster explained:

How does Google do this? Bill says a time-based delay response, a negative response, a random response, and/or an unexpected response.

There have been a lot ranking changes that are unexpected and hard to explain, maybe this is related?

Pretty interesting stuff!

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Image credit to ShutterStock