Implied links are mentions and, therefore, mentions are the new link building strategy. Probably not.

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

• 
  Edwin Jonk: Implied links are mentions and, therefore, mentions are the new link building strategy. Probably not.
  
  http://www.forbes.com/sites/jaysondemers/2014/08/01/implied-links-brand-mentions-and-the-future-of-seo-link-building/
  
  Basically this article is a plagiarism of or a copy of (to the extent that I think it is a copy):
  http://moz.com/blog/panda-patent-brand-mentions
  while the best review of the patent can be found at
  http://www.seobythesea.com/2014/04/the-panda-patent/
  
  The patent in question is
  http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-adv.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&d=PALL&S1=08682892&OS=PN/08682892&RS=PN/08682892
  
  He argues that:
  " Implied links, also called “brand mentions” or simply “mentions,” are becoming relevant to brand authority in new ways "
  However there is no mention of "brand mentions" or "mentions", nor does the patent mention "authority".
  
  Basically this article shouldn't be published. And +Bill Slawski ;makes a great point:
  https://plus.google.com/106515636986325493284/posts/LDw7f653ym2
• 
  Bill Slawski: Reading and understanding patents can be pretty challenging. Unfortunately, Demers isn't good at it, and also appears to have stolen most of his forbes article from Simon Penson, and a post he wrote at Moz:
  
  The Panda Patent: Brand Mentions Are the Future of Link Building
  http://moz.com/blog/panda-patent-brand-mentions
  
  The patent does include a count of "natural" links which includes both actual links and implied links" and not some ratio of the two - it's where both Jayson and Simon get it wrong, but it looks like Simon actually tried to understand and interpret the patent, while it looks much more likely that Jayson didn't :(
• 
  Edwin Jonk: Indeed it is plagiarism or copied from moz to the extent that I think it is copied. I was playing it "nice"... (original post edited)
• 
  Bill Slawski: I don't know what inspired him to write the post he did, so heavily inspired by someone else's post, but I hope that Forbes removes him as an author, and he learns a valuable lesson from it that he probably should have learned by sometime in elementary school. ; :(.
• 
  Edwin Jonk: To me, especially those links to his own stuff should raise a red flag.
• 
  Edwin Jonk: +Bill Slawski ;this post will be discussed at our weekly HAO [1]. Maybe you could join to explain why this article is wrong and why the moz one isn't right either.
  
  Not sure if the time suits you, maybe +Jim Munro ;can work out something...
  
  [1] ;https://plus.google.com/u/0/events/co4pnh8bitrc7lbv18pcgbro704
• 
  Bill Slawski: If a later time than 8am could be scheduled for me to join in, that would work. ; I'm not quite coherent yet by that time in the morning. ; :)
• 
  Micah Fisher-Kirshner: +Bill Slawski: Let me introduce you to my friend: caffeine. It helps me become semi-coherent by around 6AM. :)
• 
  Bill Slawski: Let me just try to describe the problems with those interpretations of the patent.
  
  What frightens me, +Micah Fisher-Kirshner, is trying to explain to a bunch of people who are filled with wonder over the concept of "brand mentions" that the concept is pure fiction, and that the patent is much more complex than that simplification. :(
  
  The patent is a quality scoring approach to content found on Web pages rather than a ranking approach, but it does have the potential impact of boosting or demoting some sections of sites on the Web. These are pages that are already indexed and already rank for some queries, and this involves re-ranking those.
  
  Instead of affecting individual pages or whole sites, it might be applied to sections of sites as selected by the search engines, even though the patent really doesn't provide us with much information about the selection process.
  
  The ratio (and fuller formula) the patent describes is:
  
  (A Count of Express links + A Count of implied links)/reference queries * (A score regarding how close pages are to navigational pages)
  
  The ratio that Simon and Jayson describe is just:
  
  Express links/Implied links
  
  Th rest of the formula sort of just disappears in their interpretations of the patent.
• 
  Edwin Jonk: One of the crux is the "reference queries", no? But I have no clue what they mean by that. Guess that was intended, no?
• 
  Bill Slawski: Reference queries are queries that Google may have decided that a page has specifically targeted. It's a query term that may be in the page title, in the page main heading, ; in the meta description, in alt text for an image on the page, in the page URL. ;
  
  So, a reference query for a page could be something like "why is water wet?" if that is repeated in prominent places like the ones I mentioned. An example targeted site might be one set up the way that content farm sites were being optimized for, with variations of keyword phrases - the more they are set up for, the more it's possible that the pages being targeted is a content farm. ;
  
  The more independent links (explicit and implied) pointing to those sections of a site, the higher quality the sections could be said to be since the count of those independent links are limited to one per domain. ;
• 
  Micah Fisher-Kirshner: I'm more than happy to listen to mathematics in the early morning.
  
  Just not finance or accounting... I'll fall asleep then.
• 
  Edwin Jonk: From the expert panel in this weeks SEO Questions hangout on air on 00:06:32 into the YouTube video: https://dumbseoquestions.com/q/implied_links_are_mentions_and_therefore_mentions_are_the_new_link_building_strategy_probably_not +Edwin Jonk
  
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