Google patent threat to Presell Pages?

SearchEngineLand posts about a recent Google patent intended to help filter out duplicated content.

Text isn’t too much of a worry - any good content development strategy in general markets will aim to minimise any duplication of text.

However, this bit really strikes out:

2. Similarity sketches can be created for pages based upon lists of hyperlink in those documents

According to this patent, a sketch is:

A similarity engine generates compact representations of objects called sketches. Sketches of different objects can be compared to determine the similarity between the two objects. The sketch for an object may be generated by creating a vector corresponding to the object, where each coordinate of the vector is associated with a corresponding weight.

Presell Pages - aka Hosted Marketing Pages - and similar names, are effectively a page of ad copy.

This can be written to sell a company, it’s products/services - and all around keyword text.

And the main purpose - to place keyword links in those pages.

Now, if you’re following a Landing Page strategy, this means the links will generally be aimed at an “elite group” of pages on the site.

Generally, we’re talking about major category pages on ecommerce stores, or main service pages for other sites.

All of which are a great way to reduce the number of links to the homepage and spread them about deeper pages.

The trouble is, if this patent applies too much weight to documents with the same key links, it’s going to be able to limit the effectiveness of Presell Pages with a Landing Page strategy in its basic format.

So the lesson?

Forewarned is forearmed.

So if you do implement a Landing Page strategy in concert with Presell Pages, ensure you distribute your linking pattern - homepage, main pages, and a couple of deep links.

This should help create a more unique link profile than Presell Pages that only have links to the same pages.