A North Carolina firm named Fortune Interactive is seeking a US Patent that they claim will have a “Radical Impact” on SEO. Lead by Mike Marshal and Andy Beal, the company claims their SEMLogic technology studies and evaluates over 100,000 data points of on- and off-page ranking factors of more than 100 competitors in any given industry, this is in addition to search engine crawler analysis.

What make me wonder is they state right up front on their website that the technology is based on Latent Semantic Indexing or LSI. LSI is currently used by many SEO firms and private consultants and has been a staple of the professional SEO for years now. Sure they have tacked on a number of additional process to the idea, but if this patent goes through, and remains based on LSI analysis, what does this mean for the rest of the SOE community? Are we no longer going to be allowed to create automated LSI tools in house or offer the services to clients? I am sure they are banking on their additional processes to distinguish their product enough for a patent, but this whole idea is a scary one.

I will be watching this close to see what if any ramifications this may have on the industry and as soon as I can find an online version of the patent application I will post it with my analysis. Keep your eyes open on this one.

[ ARTICLE UPDATE ]

I received an email from Micheal Marshall the CTO/COO of Fortune Interactive and he clarified a few things for me. Here’s a couple of portions of his email (reprinted with permission) …

“Fortune Interactive is indeed in the process of patenting its technology. However, that patent is not an LSI patent. Some components of SEMLogic address the SEO challenges that arise from a search engine’s use of LSI or other semantic analysis methods.”

“SEMLogic is based on the concept of LSI and designed as a response to it. But SEMLogic is not equal to LSI. It is not accurate to characterize SEMLogic as an LSI method itself. It is a tool which in part deals with LSI.”

This is good news, and I am glad Mr. Marshall contacted me. I am still going to look a bit closer into the patent application when I get time. I am curious to see what type of restrictions a patent like this could possibly place on others looking to automate some if their LSI based analysis.

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