I was talking to someone, yesterday, who works in an SEO company, and they briefly mentioned Google's 'Similarity Engine'. Is this patented/under development or is it operative as of now? And what are the ramifications?
This was a patent Google filed way back that was ratified this year. There is a news story on web pro news, I can't post it as I have not made enough posts but do a seatch for google similarity engine and you will find it.
It's positive news; it is the next stage on big G's war on scraper sites, copied articles are the like. Whether it becomes part of their algorithm, who knows.
We tend to advise our clients not to worry about the so called duplicate content filter, unless they are copying and pasting whole pages. Strangely, when we say this they often take another day or two to produce their content.
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This is not new technology though, it has been around in one form or another for years. Ramesh Jain and his gand filed a patent in 1999 along similar lines (Ramesh Jain is the pioneer of artificial intelligence).
Another thing to read up on is Block level link analysis, which again creates a visual interpretation of the page for link analysis.