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Today’s note is going to honor someone I’ve featured multiple times on SEO Notebook. That person is the late Bill Slawski.
For those of you who don’t know Bill Slawski. He dedicated a lot of energy to analyzing and distilling Google patents. Bill passed away in May 2022, but he left us with a huge body of work over at seobythesea.com
Last week his former colleague at Go Fish Digital Chris Long offered a brilliant suggestion… to use ChatGPT to summarize Bill’s analysis.
Let’s look at the summary from the Reasonable Surfer Model Updated:
Google's Reasonable Surfer Model Updated
From ChatGPT:
“In 2016, Google updated its Reasonable Surfer Model, which replaced the earlier Random Surfer Model. The Reasonable Surfer Model determines the probability that a user will click on specific links based on their features, such as color, size, font style, and anchor text. The model reflects that not all links are equally likely to be followed, and the amount of PageRank passed along is based on the probability of a user clicking a link.
The patent for the Reasonable Surfer Model was updated with new claims that refer to anchor text more frequently and emphasize that the weight passed along by links is based on the probability of clicking on a specific link. This makes the model even more "reasonable" than the initial version, as it better accounts for user behavior when determining the value of a link.”