seo

Posted by David Mihm

Caveat: I am definitely not a professional interface designer; this task I leave largely to the experts on our UX & Design team. My goal behind this post is to increase usage of Places for Business, however, and raise the visibility of that destination among the small-business-focused marketing community.

Setting aside the difficulty that Google had integrating Zagat into its product mix, its own branding difficulties in the Local space have been well-chronicled. Following the zigzag from Local to Maps to Places to Places-with-Hotspot, back to just Places, then to Plus-Local, and (finally?) plain ol’ Plus has been like observing a misguided exercise in corporate alligator escapism.

Although the result of this hodgepodge of brands appears largely the same to consumers, who probably weren’t all that keyed into the evolution anyway, Google’s ill-defined brand in Local has almost certainly been a contributing factor to its deficit in business owner engagement relative to Facebook.

It’s just not clear to the average brick-and-mortar business owner, let alone the average SEO, where she should go to get started at Google. While Google’s “first responders” in the support forums have been darned consistent in their mantra of using Places for Business to manage this presence, this destination gets very little love in Google’s mainstream advertising — or even AdWords. It’s impossible to get to from Google’s primary business-oriented pages, and a number of searches (including “Google Plus Local Page“) return this answer.

Which is a shame, because the Plus management interface offers a vastly inferior experience for business owners. Although I recommended it last year, here’s why I no longer encourage business owners (or SEOs) to use it, and why I’ve come around to places.google.com.

The deficiencies of the Google+ page management interface

1. No UI hierarchy

This interface is a jumble of Pinterest-like modules, with none more or less important than the others. If I were to answer my own question (“What am I supposed to look at?”), my natural inclination would seem to be the big green box in the middle — “Start a video call with your followers.” Hardly something the average business owner is going to have time for or get any value out of.

Meanwhile, attributes that are core to a business’s success (categories, hours, location information) are hidden behind a white-on-white button, and my natural primary activity (posting as my business rather than as myself) is easy to miss when juxtaposed alongside the “green monster.” It’s no wonder that even LinkedIn beats Google+ for social sharing.

2. Mis-targeting the average SMB

The eager-beaver SMBs who explore the navigation beyond the first page are likely to find themselves pretty lost. They’re asked to install plugins, buttons, and even connect to the Google APIs console (while being consoled that it’s only a 3-step process). Something like 50% of this audience doesn’t even have a website, and 90% doesn’t even have a mobile website, for goodness sake.

3. Slightly misleading insights

The Places dashboard hasn’t exactly been a paragon of useful information, but my main complaint with this tab is presentation, rather than data. There’s actually quite a bit of useful information here, but unfortunately it’s hidden in the default view. “Actions” and “Views” are presented flatly, where a view of a post is treated with the same importance as a click for driving directions or into a business’s website. So a business is likely to miss out on what are actually some pretty important metrics, or at least see some inflated numbers.

4. No help

The only way to get help with this far-from-simple product is to click first into settings, and then into “Learn More” on the section that you’re interested in.

The strengths of the Places management interface

1. Extremely clear messaging

Strong calls to action pop right off the page here: the green-backgrounded “Complete your business information,” the blue-backgrounded “Edit information,” and even the boringness of the grayed-out “Add photo” area all point directly to what Google and the SMB are both trying to accomplish with this product.

2. Perfect targeting of the average SMB

It’s evident that the designers of the Places Dashboard have spent plenty of time watching business owners using their product. Clicking the question mark just once brings up tooltips alongside all the major sections of the tool. Not only does this decrease the number of questions Google is likely to receive from business owners, but it answers those questions in a clear, friendly tone that gives less-sophisticated owners a great first impression of Google’s products.

3. Clear(er) insights

This simplistic interface is very transparent about the data it’s showing (number of times this listing appeared in a local search result), and presents a much more representative view of a business’s presence at Google (my page only has 3 actions) without overcomplicating the situation for the business owner.

4. Terrific tooltips and inline help text

Here’s where the experience of the Places team really shines through: They don’t take any pre-existing knowledge of how business listings work for granted, walking the business owner through every step of the page-creation process.

5. Phone support (!)

And of course, if a business owner isn’t able to figure things out on their own, there are plenty of relevant links directly to the most-commonly asked questions, and the process highlights Google’s revolutionary option of phone support.

Conclusion

Given how much effort has been put into the Local Business Center / Places for Business Dashboard over the last several years — and the extremely polished result those efforts have yielded — I’m surprised Google continues to throw any energy into promoting the Plus management option to small businesses, let alone developing and maintaining it.

Any business owner who visits Plus should be sent right over to the Places for Business Dashboard. It seems to be much more empathetic to the typical business owner’s level of sophistication, and solves their most important needs more directly than Plus.

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Posted by Tom Anthony

As SEOs we talk a lot about “search queries” (or simply “searches”), yet I think search has outgrown our definition of what exactly a search query is. In this post I’m going to explain how I think the old definition is fast becoming less and less useful to us, and also how I believe this is going to mean we’re going to talk about keywords less and less.

Traditional query model

I recently spoke at Kahenacon in Israel about the evolution of search (deck), where I discussed four trends I identified that were influencing the changes I expect to see in search over the next 3-4 years. I noticed that there was a common theme that kept coming up amongst them: Our understanding of what we mean when we say “query” has become too narrow.

The traditional query model is the one where a search query looks like this:

This is the keyword-focused model we have always used, and it has served us well for two decades. However, things are changing, and I think we are already at a point where thinking of a search query in this way is inadequate.

First, let’s examine things from Google’s perspective. They want to understand the users intent when they did this search: what the expectation of the user is, what they are looking for, and more specifically, what search results would best help answer their query. Some questions Google might ask about the “london tube stations” query:

• Is this a schoolchild looking for a history of the tube stations for some homework?
• Is this someone looking for a list of all the tube station names (we have a fair amount of drinking games in the UK based on these names)?
• Is this someone looking for a tube station?
• etc.

There are clearly lots more possible situations, and it is quite hard to determine what the user wants. However, the keyword(s) I type in are not the entire query; they are not everything Google has to go on in order to answer this query. It actually looks more like this to Google:

The query consists of the keywords that we explicitly typed in, but also the implicit portion of our request based on our context.

With this information, it suddenly becomes a lot easier to determine what the user is likely looking for and what types of response will best help them. Furthermore, my example above only gives me a 3-4 extra data points (location, device, potentially a guess at connection type from IP address and connection speed). However, Google are using a lot more signals than that (at least 57 if you aren’t logged in), so I imagine the implicit aspect of the query probably contains a lot more.

New query model

I don’t think there is a scenario where Google is not using an implicit aspect to a query — even if we put aside things such as language and which version of Google you are using. There are multiple facets to what is covered by this implicit search (see the next section on context), but the main takeaway is that the search results are always dependent on some implicit aspects.

Therefore, I think we need to adjust our understanding of what a query is. After some discussion in the Distilled office, our initial proposal is relatively simple:

If we accept my premise, then it is hard to move backwards from this realisation of what a query actually is.

However, a good question at this point might be: does it actually change anything? Before I try to answer that, let me first try to make sure we are all understanding what I mean when I say context.

Context: the source of the implicit query

We’ve talked a lot about ‘mobile search’ and ‘personalised search’ over the last few years in the SEO community. However, I believe both of these phrases are too narrow:

• Mobile search: This has traditionally referred to the device that I’m using, but that is clearly misleading. More and more people are searching on their smartphones from their houses. People are using tablets and ultrabooks on the move. Mobile search should talk about the person and their state (staying still or on the move). However, it doesn’t cover every aspect of their state (are they walking or driving, are they at work or play, etc.) — so we need something broader.
• Personalised search: A couple of years ago we fought personalised search, doing things like manipulating the Google query string to try to disable it, as we wanted to know what the “real results” were. However, I think a wave of acceptance is washing over the community as we realise that concept is in our rear view mirror. However, personalised search is only partially responsible for that. When we talk about personalised search, the common understanding of it points to a user’s preferences (determined by social connections, search history etc.). To me this causes confusion — if I run the same search at a different time of the day at a different location, I get different results. Both are personalised, but personalisation doesn’t capture nearly every aspect of why my search results are different in each case.

Beyond these two examples I imagine there are a whole host of other facets that are responsible for the customisation of the search results. I’ve begun calling all of these various aspects “context.” Context encapsulates both mobile and personalisation, and a whole host of other signals (including those that Google has yet to discover/begin using).

The implicit-aspect of queries comes from the users’ context, so these two concepts are completely intertwined.

I expect that we are going to continue to see more and more context signals being used to drive richer and more detailed implicit-aspects to queries. Just a couple of months ago at Google’s I/O conference they announced this new Android API:

It allows anyone writing an app for Android to ask the phone whether it believes the user is walking, cycling, or driving. I can certainly imagine this being part of the implicit query — a good example being a restaurant search, which might cover a larger radius if I’m in a car than if I am on foot.

Furthermore, earlier this year Google acquired Behavio, the team behind funf, the “Social and Behavioural Sensing Framework.” This framework basically tries to predict what a user will be doing next based on the current and past states of various sensors on their phone (which wifi networks they’ve connected to at what times, social proximity, etc.). Imagine a prediction of what you’ll be doing next as part of the context of a search. It sounds crazy, yet in some aspects we are already there.

Implicit-only searches

When Google was founded, Sergey and Larry dreamed of a world where there was no search query at all:

He was talking about having no explicit query, and we are rapidly reaching a situation where such searches are a reality; many people report fantastic results from Google Now, where the query is entirely context-based:

What does this mean for keywords?

For as long as there has been web search engines, there has been SEO, and for as long as there has been SEO, there has been a focus on keywords. I believe we are at a transition point wherein the next 2-3 years is going to see a declining focus on keywords.

Imagine the absurdity a couple of years ago if a small-restaurant owner said he wanted to be in position 1 (or even page 1) for the terms “restaurant” or “breakfast.” Sure, there are local results, but actually ranking in the “main” results is silly! Then along came the Venice update (post via Mike Ramsay) and suddenly that didn’t seem so silly. (Will Critchlow recalls how a ‘breakfast’ search worked great for him in this Distilled Live video.) Now it is possible for small companies to rank for things like “restaurant,” or the “divorce attorney” from Mike’s post, but only within certain limited contexts.

There are a couple of other points of consideration around the future of keywords:

• The move towards the knowledge graph, entity searches, and Google’s associated shift from indexing to understanding.
• The move from “web search” to “contextual search” (think Google Glass and Siri).
• (not provided) is on the rise, and we’re rapidly losing keyword data anyway.

I did cover some of this stuff in the deck, and it is outside of the scope of this post. However, I will likely be talking about this at SearchLove London in October, and likely writing more about it over the coming months, as I think think the combination of these things means we are going to look back on 2013 and 2014 as an inflection point for search.

So, you’re saying keywords aren’t important?

Not quite. As long as people are doing language-driven searches (be it text or spoken word) — which is going to be for some time to come — keywords are obviously going to be important. What the user explicitly enters as part of their search query is clearly always going to be important.

What I’m saying (in this post) is that we need to stop looking at keywords and starting looking at queries — which are nowadays so much more than just the keywords. A query will have explicit and implicit aspects, and the explicit aspect could be a chain of several keywords and additional metadata.

In addition, the move from indexing to understanding (not really covered in this post — see the Distilled Live video and my deck) means that even putting aside the above point, the link between the keywords that the user types in and the keyword(s) Google for which shows listings is no longer as direct as it once was. As Google comes to understand the entities involved, the link becomes far more complex; we’ll see some benefits (stop worrying about synonyms and long tail) and some downsides (Google won’t grasp all entities and relationships perfectly).

Finally, the keywords your users are typing in can be really insightful to understand what their intent is — what they really want. This is a point made by AJ Kohn in his recent post on keywords.

So, then… what does this mean for doing SEO?

That is an excellent question, and I’ll start by saying I certainly don’t have all of the answers to this. I’m mostly writing this post as this is something we’ve been talking about at Distilled, but I would really love to hear from the Moz community about your thoughts around this and what you guys think it could mean.

A few initial thoughts:

• When you are looking at traffic in your analytics, broken down by keywords, you need to bear in mind that there was likely a variety of contexts involved (for any specific keyword, but also across keywords). Working out what contexts you are performing well in is going to be something that is going to be increasingly valuable.
• We need to begin working out the “context personas” that we think we can serve with our pages; there are users in a variety of different situations and we need to identify how their intents differ and how we can best serve them. In the near future, this might include having landing pages targeting contexts (or intents) rather than keywords.
• The way we report to our clients (or management) needs to begin to change in some instances. Reporting on raw keywords is going to potentially become less and less worthwhile, and we need to start educating our clients now such that they understand this shift.

Final words

I imagine there are potentially going to be some people who rise up to defend keywords, but please realise I’m not saying keywords are dead — just that they no longer give the full picture. I think that Google is going to increasingly consider context, and we should begin working out how we can work that into our understanding.

Whether you agree/disagree or have a slightly different idea of how we should model this, I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.

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Posted by randfish

Getting your site to display at the top of a SERP is quite an accomplishment, but it also takes quite a bit of effort to keep it there. If people click through to your site only to click their back buttons and look for another result, the search engines are going to catch on, and you could fall in the rankings.

In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand helps us broaden our thinking to satisfy the searchers and keep them from pogo-sticking back to the SERP.

PRO Tip: Learn more about on-page optimization for content and UX at Moz Academy.

For reference, here’s a still image of this week’s whiteboard:

Video Transcription

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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Posted by Aleyda

One of the most frequent questions I get is about the tools that I use for international SEO, and although I included most of them in my international SEO presentation at MozCon, since I didn’t had the time to focus on them, I would like to share how I use them to support my international SEO activities.

There are tools to support every part of your journey, including identifying the potential, targeting an international audience, optimizing and promoting the websites, earning international popularity, and measuring and achieving benefit with the international SEO process. Let’s get started!

Your initial international search status

Identify your initial international search visibility, from the volume and trends of queries to pages’ impressions, clicks, and the CTR you get per country. Use the “Search Queries” report in Google Webmaster Tools and filter by location.

In the Google Analytics “Demographics” report, check your current visits, conversions, conversion rate volume, and trends coming from different countries and languages, along the traffic sources, keywords, and pages used.

Your international search potential

Beyond researching the search volume for relevant keywords in the language and country that you want to target (using the keyword tool of the most popular search engine in the relevant country), you can also use tools like SEMrush and SearchMetrics — which support many countries — to identify your current market activity and competitors.

To find out which search engine is the most popular in your target country, you can use StatCounter or Alexa, and then use their keyword tools to verify the specific search volume. It would most likely be Google Keyword Planner for the western world that mostly uses Google, Yandex Keyword Statistics for Russia, and Baidu Index for China.

Your international keyword ideas

Identify additional keyword ideas with Ubersuggest (where you can choose between many different languages and countries) and the Suggestion Keyword Finder tool.

Why I don’t recommend Google’s Global Market Finder

I’m also frequently asked why I don’t recommend (or recommend, but only very carefully) Google’s Global Market Finder in my International SEO advice, and here’s the reason: It’s frequently inaccurate with the translations and term localization, and can easily lead to confusion and misunderstandings.

The tool has an “important note” below the results:

“…since the translations are created using Google Translate, they are not always perfect so be sure to confirm that the terms you’re selecting are accurate…”

Even so, people usually assume that since it’s a Google tool the results should be okay. In some cases, though, when you’re not a native speaker of a language, it’s very hard to know for sure when it’s right or not.

Because of this, the tool is useless most of the time, since it only adds additional complexity to the process. In the end, you’ll need native support anyway, as well as validation with other keyword tools for more accurate keyword ideas and their search volume.

For example, let’s say I’m from an American company looking for the potential search volume in Mexico related to “apartments” and “rent apartments”:

The tool suggests “pisos”, “alquiler apartamentos”, and “alquilar apartamentos”. These results have the following issues:

• The term “pisos” in Mexico is not used as a translation of “apartments,” but instead is what the “floor” is called. It is in Spain where apartments are called “pisos.”
• “Alquiler apartamentos” is “apartment rentals,” and “alquilar apartamentos” is “rent apartaments,” but while these terms are popular in Spain (and some other countries), they are not in Mexico. In Mexico, for “Alquiler apartamentos” it would be “Renta departamentos,” and “Alquilar apartamentos” would instead be “Rentar departamentos.”

You can see how if you search for these Global Market Finder-suggested terms in Google’s own keyword research tool, their local search volume is very low compared to the ones I mention, which are the correct ones to use in this situation:

Additionally, the term “Alquiler apartamentos” is not grammatically correct, since it needs a “de” preposition. It should be “Alquiler de apartamentos” (literally meaning “Rent of apartments” in Spanish). Although it’s true this can also happen with any keyword research tool, in this case it adds even more confusion to the process. As I mentioned before, you will end-up requiring native support to be accurate anyway.

Your international audience profile

Understand your target international audience’s demographic characteristics and online buying preferences not only by researching with studies like the Comscore Data Mine, but by browsing the TNS Digital Life and Google’s Consumer Barometer sites. These sites let you select and interact with their data for almost every industry, country, and demographic characteristic.

Your international industry’s behavior and characteristics

Identify your competitors in the international market, including their characteristics and trends, by researching with Alexa, Rnkrnk, Google’s Display Network Research, and SimilarWeb.

You should understand which are their most popular products and content, their unique selling proposition, their weaknesses and strengths, which marketing activities they’re already developing, and a little about their online communities.

Your hreflang annotations

Make sure to include the correct hreflang annotations on the different versions of your international pages, indicating the language and country targeting of each page, following the ISO639-1 format for the language attribute and ISO 3166-1 Alpha 2 for the country attribute.

You can use the DejanSEO hreflang validator to check the usage on a specific page, or Rob Hammond’s SEO Crawler to quickly verify if all the pages are correctly featuring the notation. If you need to validate more than the 250 internal pages allowed, you can use the filters in Screaming Frog to specifically identify those pages which contain (or don’t contain) the desired hreflang tags.

Your country-targeted website’s geolocation

If you’re country targeting and using a top-level domain, you can geolocate it using Google, Bing, and Yandex Webmaster Tools’ geolocation features.

Nonetheless, the best way to geolocate a domain is by using the relevant ccTLD for each country. Take a look at IANA’s database with each country code registry operator that usually allows domains to be purchased on their sites, or feature those approved domain registrars in each country.

Additionally, although it doesn’t play as important a role as before, take a look at the example below. Minube, one of the most important travel communities in Spain, is hosted in Germany. If you can have a local IP for your website without much effort, that could be beneficial. You can check any website IP by using the FlagFox extension for Firefox or the Flag for Chrome extension.

Your international web content

It’s important that you develop attractive and optimized content for your international target audience that not only includes the desired keywords, but is interesting, serves to connect with your visitors, and helps you achieve your international website goals.

For this, it’s fundamental that you have native support. If it’s difficult for you to find that, check out online translator communities such as ProZ.

In order to validate your content, you might want to use professional translation software (more reliable than Google Translate) that also integrates with Office for example, making it easier to use. PROMT is one good example.

If at some specific point in the process (hopefully not for long) you don’t have direct access to a native language speaker, or you just want to double-check something specifically, you should take a look at the WordReference forum. There’s an amazing number of threads around phrases and translations for many languages.

On a day-to-day basis, you should also keep updated with the international trends and hot topics in order to identify new content for the website. For this, you can use Google Trends (take a look at the Hot Searches per country); Twitterfall, which lets you to easily follow up with a specific topic and has geotargeting features; and Talkwalker, a tool that supports many languages and easily generates alerts via email or RSS.

Your international popularity analysis

To research and understand your international competitors’ link-building strategies, sources, and the popularity gap you have with them, you can use the same link- and social-analysis tools you likely already have, like Open Site Explorer, MajesticSEO, LinkRisk, and SocialCrawlytics.

Nonetheless, in this case, you should pay extra attention to the international audience’s preferences, beyond link quality, volume, trends, sources, and types. Look at the social activity and profile, the most linked and shared content, the seasonality, the terms used and sites shared, the local industry influencers, and the favorite types of content, topics, and formats.

Your international link-building

Promote your international website assets by leveraging relevant local sites, understanding cultural factors, building relationships with local influencers and media, and identifying what works best in each country to scale and track the response to each international version.

For international prospecting you can use Link Prospector, FollowerWonk, and Topsy, and then follow up and manage your links with BuzzStream.

Your international search visibility

To easily verify how your international search audience sees your site ranking in their search results, you can use I Search From or Search Latte to quickly get the desired country and language’s results.

Nonetheless, to make sure you’re really seeing what your audience from other locations is seeing, it’s best to do so with a local IP by using a proxy service. This will also let you verify your website from the desired international location and check to see if there’s any types of settings for them, like a redirect, for example.

For this, you can use a free proxy browser add-on, like the ones from FoxyProxy, along any of HMA’s Public Proxy list. If you want to have more reliable service, better speed, and select between many IPs, you also have paid ones, such as Hide My Ass or Trusted Proxies.

Your international search results

Measure each of your International web versions independently, from the rankings for each relevant country and language to the visits and conversions. Remember to pay extra attention to the currency settings, cross-domain tracking, and the country and language traffic alignment.

For each of the international versions, segment and analyze the rankings, visits, conversions, average conversion value and rate, the used keywords, pages, sources of traffic per languages, location, and devices.

For your search rankings, you can use web-based tools like Moz Rank Tracker, SEscout, and Authority Labs, which support international search engines, or use desktop applications such as Advanced Web Rankings, along with a proxy service to avoid being blocked. For quick revisions you can use free browser extensions such as Rank Checker for Firefox and SEO SERP for Chrome.

For the site behavior with the search engines, it is important that you also follow up with Google Webmaster Tools (or the Webmaster Tools of the relevant international search engine) along with Google Analytics, from a traffic and conversion analysis perspective. That will let you to continuously follow-up with your International SEO results, and allow you to make the appropriate decisions.

Your international SEO ROI

Calculate what’s required in order to achieve your conversion goals and a high ROI in your international SEO process while taking the SEO process costs into consideration. You can use the International SEO ROI calculator to facilitate this activity.

Last but not least, let’s not forget that despite all the help that these tools might give you the most important tool you have is your own brain.

Unfortunately I’ve seen how we forget sometimes about turning on an “autopilot,” missing great opportunities (or even making mistakes) as a consequence.

Tools are not meant to replace you, but to support you, so do your own analysis, test everything and validate frequently, using your brain.

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Posted by Dr-Pete

The morning of July 19th there was a major Google update, and no one is talking about it. Put simply: We missed it, because we just weren’t looking for it. Overnight, the number of queries we track in the MozCast 10K beta system that show some kind of Knowledge Graph jumped from 17.8% to 26.7%, an increase of over 50%. This was not a test or a one-day fluke — here’s a graph for all of July 2013 (as of August 20th, the number has remained stable near 27%):

So, let’s get to the meat of it — who were the big overnight winners? What did those “new” Knowledge Graph boxes look like, and were there any clear patterns?

The overnight winners

There were 908 queries that picked up Knowledge Graph (KG) entries on July 19th in our data, so the full list is a bit much for a blog post, but let’s look at 20 high-volume queries (this data was actually pulled on August 16th, since some queries had lost KG boxes in the interim):

1. garmin
2. primark
3. avianca
4. ancestry
5. suntrust
6. toms
7. royal caribbean
8. cheap tickets
9. oakley
10. forex
11. tractor supply
12. discount tire
13. ulta
14. casio
15. nectar
16. famous footwear
17. new balance
18. david’s bridal
19. gander mountain
20. philippine airlines

At a glance, 16 of these seem to be known brands (I think we can count “ancestry” and “cheap tickets” as brand queries in 2013), with “forex”, “tractor supply”, “discount tire”, and “nectar” not having obvious brand associations. We’ll come back to “forex” (I discovered something interesting there), but Google is treating both “tractor supply” and “discount tire” as brand queries. The Knowledge Graph for “tractor supply” shows:

A search for “discount tire” shows a smaller, expanding KG entry, below ads and a map (for my search, at least):

The one clear outlier in this group was the search for “nectar”, which pulled up two KG-style entries (we classify them pretty loosely, to throw a wide net): (1) an answer-box style entry (but in the right-hand column), and (2) a disambiguation box:

Across the entire data set, “brand” queries seemed to fare well in this Knowledge Graph gold rush, although there were exceptions. Let’s look at an interesting case — the search for “forex”.

The Forex oddity

“Forex” is a highly competitive search term, and pretty notorious for being spammed. When I went to check the query, I wasn’t seeing a Knowledge Graph entry, so I took a look at the history since mid-July. The #1 position has bounced back and forth between Wikipedia and Forex.com. Across 32 days of data (since July 19th), Wikipedia has ranked #1 (in our data set) 10 of those days. Every day Wikipedia has ranked #1, the SERP has shown a Knowledge Graph entry:

On the 22 days where Forex.com ranked #1 (and Wikipedia ranked #2), a Knowledge Graph entry only appeared three times (13.6%). As you can see, the KG entry is informational, suggesting that Google is interpreting the query as an information-seeking search. While this is highly speculative, it’s possible that the informational interpretation that drives this KG entry is also pushing Wikipedia into the #1 spot. When, for whatever reason, Google interprets the query more loosely or as a navigational query, then Forex.com ranks #1 and the KG entry often disappears. Again, this is just speculation, but it does demonstrate that — like rankings — KG entries are being interpreted and displayed in real-time and can fluctuate from search to search.

The Wikipedia connection

You can see even from these few examples that many of the new results are using data from Wikipedia. When Google launched Knowledge Graph in May of 2012, they stated that “Google’s Knowledge Graph isn’t just rooted in public sources such as Freebase, Wikipedia and the CIA World Factbook.” Of course, this implies that Freebase, Wikipedia, and the CIA Factbook are sources, and observations of KG data seem to support this.

What’s interesting about the new Knowledge Graph entries coming from Wikipedia is that they suggest that the data itself isn’t new. It’s unlikely that Wikipedia entries/data exploded overnight, so that leaves us with two theories: (1) Google imported more existing Wikipedia data, or (2) Google chose to let more queries display a Knowledge Graph entry and lowered some kind of algorithmic threshold. As large as Wikipedia is, it’s unlikely that storage capacity is a major issue for Google, so I think that (2) is the more likely explanation — Google has simply loosened the restrictions on which queries can trigger the Knowledge Graph.

The entity connection

So, what’s tipping these new Knowledge Graph entries? I try to avoid the word “brand” when talking about the algorithm, because it carries a lot of bias and we all seem to mean something a little different. I do think, however, that there is an entity connection that certainly looks brand-like. Here’s another odd query that gained a KG entry on July 19th — “chicken recipes“:

For most of us, I think Lee’s Famous Recipe Chicken is a bit of stretch for “chicken recipes”, which is clearly an informational query. Even Google organic results clearly recognize the intent, with actual recipes for chicken dishes taking up the entire top 10.

Here’s another odd query that generated a suggestion for an entity — “army games“:

What’s funny is that Google doesn’t display a “Showing results for…” spelling correction or seem to think that I actually meant “armor” when I typed “army”. They’ve just chosen to give a fairly unrelated entity a bit of extra credit. All of the top 10 rankings are based on “army” and there is no mention of Armor Games outside of the KG entry.

The entity/brand connection is a nice theory, but then we have a query like “vegetarian recipes“, which also picked up a KG entry on July 19th:

Here, the Knowledge Graph entry is informational, and doesn’t seem to have a brand/entity association. So, before we go off on the “BIG BRANDS GET ALL THE BREAKS!” warpath, I think we have to take a deep breath and try to get a handle on the facts. My gut feeling is that Google has bumped up the volume on the Knowledge Graph, letting KG entries appear more frequently.

In many cases, this seems to have benefited brands, but keep two things in mind: (1) Many of these brands are small, and (2) That could be a side effect and not the primary intent. The simple fact is that brands are entities, and as Google builds a “web of things,” entities are going to gain ground and pages are likely going to lose ground.

Update (August 21st)

In the comments, Will Critchlow pointed out that Nectar is a well-known brand in the UK. When you search “nectar” on Google.co.uk, the entity/brand association is much clearer:

So, essentially, 19 out of the 20 queries on that list were brand-related, with “forex” being ambiguous depending on the context. This also clearly shows the impact of localization and the complexity of how KG entries are being triggered.

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