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In 2003, engineers at Google filed a patent that would rock the SEO world. Named Document Scoring Based on Document Content Update, the patent not only offered insight into the mind of the world’s largest search engine, but provided an accurate roadmap of the path Google would take for years to come.

In his series on the 10 most important search patents of all time, Bill Slawski shows how this patent spawned many child patents. These are often near-duplicate patents with slightly modified passages – the latest discovered as recently as October 2011. Many of the algorithmic changes we see today are simply improvements of these original ideas conceived years ago by Google engineers...

I hear a lot of webmasters complain day in and day out about all the changes that Google constantly makes to its algorithm and how they affect our search engine placement.

Let me break it to you: it’s not all about what Google has done and will do to update its algorithm.

It’s about what you SHOULD BE doing.

I am sure we all can agree that Google’s ultimate goal is to help people find the most relevant and highest quality sites in Google’s search results (whether they are any good at it is not the question). They are not putting out all these updates just to mess with you...