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Imagine the following.

You have a web site for your retail store, which sells bowling balls, and shoes, and shirts in Central New Jersey.

The site doesn’t sell any of your products online, yet. In the future it might, but right now, it acts to let people know what you offer, and how they can get to your store.

You include your address on a contact page and a directions page, which are linked to by all of the other pages, but your address is only on those two pages. It should be on all of them, but your designer wanted to fill the pages of the site with multi-colored balls, and shoes and shirts.

If someone does a search in Google for bowling balls New Jersey, will your site come up in the search results? Maybe, and maybe not. If the phrase bowling balls doesn’t appear on the same page as New Jersey, it just might not come up in the pages shown from a query.

How might a search engine tie together your pages on bowling balls with the fact that you are in New Jersey, when none of those product description pages mentions your location?

A new patent application from Google describes how it could happen. I’ve posted a thread on the forums which breaks down the patent application, Assigning Geographic Locations to Web Pages.

The inventors of the process described in the patent know a little about geography. They were involved in the creation of Google Maps.