Cross-Domain Catalog Widget via JSONP for Search Visibility
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Solution Overview
Problem
Smaller websites face a lower chance of being discovered by search engine users due to search engines giving higher rankings to domains with a larger number of associated web pages, making it difficult for businesses to sell products effectively online.
Innovation Solution
Implementing cross-domain communication using JSONP protocol to serve cloud-based product catalog pages from a seller's domain, allowing search engine crawlers to perceive these pages as hosted on the manufacturer's website, thereby increasing search engine rankings while utilizing a third-party partner for hosting.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Ease of manufacture
If a seller uses a third-party cloud provider to host product catalog pages, then the seller can leverage external hosting infrastructure, but the catalog pages are perceived by search engines as being on the third-party domain rather than the seller's domain, resulting in lower search engine rankings for the seller's website
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces a domain fronting mechanism where the seller's domain acts as an intermediary layer between the third-party cloud provider and search engines. The cloud provider hosts catalog pages under the seller's domain name (e.g., catalog.seller.com), allowing search engines to perceive the pages as belonging to the seller's domain while still utilizing the third-party hosting infrastructure. This resolves the contradiction by making the seller's domain the visible intermediary to search engines.
2Productivity
If a seller hosts all catalog pages on their own domain, then search engine rankings improve due to increased page quantity on the domain, but the seller must bear the full burden of hosting infrastructure and maintenance
Solution Approach 1:
The seller's domain serves as an intermediary layer that decouples the hosting infrastructure from the domain identity. The third-party cloud provider handles the actual hosting and maintenance burden, while the seller's domain fronts the catalog pages to search engines and users. This allows the seller to benefit from improved search rankings without assuming the complexity of hosting infrastructure management.
Data Source
AI summary
Methods, systems, computer-readable media, and apparatuses are presented for using cross-domain communication to allow manufacturers and other sellers to use cloud/Internet-based products catalog services without sacrificing the search-engine optimization benefit of catalog pages hosted within the manufacturer's domain. The Same Origin Policy used by many browsers may disallow direct communication to the manufacturer's domain for corporate web site and other functions, on the one hand, and an external domain for an efficiently hosted products catalog, on the other. Some embodiments present the use of the JSONP protocol for cross-domain retrieval of a Catalog Widget that is configured to retrieve product catalog information directly from the external domain. In these embodiments, search-engine optimization is furthered by the efficient production of numerous catalog pages that originate from the external domain yet appear to users and search engine crawlers to be within the manufacturer's domain.