I just read a really interesting aricle by William Slawski, which discussed a new patent by an employee of Google, which has implications for website owners using LSI to create their pages, as well as all of those spam pages out there (which is a good thing).

This patent is about using phrases to classify, and rank web pages, and serves as a warning not to overdo the use of related words or phrases (search engine recognized synonyms). Basically, this algorithm collects data relating to what are considered associated phrases, including ther frequency of use (of the humber of related phrases on a given document), as well as other more complex methods of filtering the data. Thus, another level of filter can be applied to the current ranking filters.

I won’t try and go into the details - you can check it out here. It’s a long post, but worthwhile. In fact, it’s something that really needs to be read a few times. The interesting thing is, this is not really discussed much in relation to LSI. The whole idea of clusters is quite fascinating, especially given the way computer networks operate - you can kind of see where some of the information comes from in terms of inspiration.

The concept of counting how many times synonyms are used on a webpage is an interesting one. Perhaps this is being done to head off ‘LSI stuffing’, in much the same way that we had ‘keyword stuffing’ a few years ago.

When writing articles for your sites, if you write naturally, and ‘keep it real’, you’re unlikely to run into any trouble with this filter, even using LSI. The point of any article, even one that is geared to put people in a buying mood, or achieve some other action, is to provide a certain level of information. So, you’d probably be hard pressed to actually use too many synonyms if you’re writing with this viewpoint in mind. Heck - you might even pick up a few more satisfied subscribers 

But I wonder what the spammers will do now. Anyone else noticed in their spam comments folder how some are even stringing a sentence together now. I’m sure their english teachers would be pleased…