Did Google Knowledge Graph Change SEO?

This year Google announced a number of improvements in their services and cemented their inviolable position in the technology world. The most important announcements on this year’s Google I/O conference were definitively launches of cloud computing platform GCE, Jelly Bean and Google Nexus 7. However, they didn’t forget to update their search technology as well.

Google Search Technology

It goes without saying that webmasters and marketers all over the world are familiar with the importance of Google search engine for boosting rankings of their websites. Content marketing and keyword research are, as you know, very widely used SEO strategies and this is why Google search results are of great importance for marketers. There are many tools for analyzing website metrics and tracking visits, but search results remain among the most important resources for marketers to get insight into how people behave online.

To further improve their search technology Google decided to make their search smarter by introducing Knowledge Graph. The new form of search was launched in US in May, but it is only few weeks ago that it was released in other English speaking countries. As for the rest of the world, it seems that they would have to wait a bit more.

What is Google Knowledge Graph?

Knowledge Graph is Google’s innovation that enables smarter search by using the algorithm that not only analyzes strings of words, but also recognizes their meaning. It draws this knowledge from a database containing 3.5 billion facts and 500 million objects and tries to figure out all the possible meanings of a search query. The whole idea is a part of Semantic Web project which was initiated many years ago, but was never actually completed.

How does it look like?

Google remains largely the same, but there is an addition in the form of a panel that appears on the right side of Google’s regular results. The “knowledge panel” contains other useful information that are in some way related to the search. These pieces of information are offered on the basis of related concepts and, more importantly for marketers, on the basis of what other people were searching for.

How does it impact SEO?

To marketers this related search is significant because it provides a better insight into what people actually search for on the web. Marketers can relate previous searches to the existing query and thus develop the strategy for attracting users. This makes Google Knowledge Graph similar to other marketing tools like Google AdWords and Google Insights, but in a simpler and more natural form.

On the other hand, Knowledge Graph emphasizes only the most relevant information related to the query and this is why marketers wondered about the impact it would have onto modern SEO strategies. Many pointed out that this will definitively end the era where online content is created for search engines instead of people and this probably sounds scary to those who extensively apply such strategies. However, this is by no chance a bad thing. The game rules might change, but not necessarily in a negative way. The fact that the search is smarter means that the marketers would have to find smarter ways of attracting visitors. If this means they should improve the quality of their content, it can only be a good thing.

After the introduction of Penguin and Panda algorithms, many rules of SEO changed. Search engines are getting smarter and there is not much place for using fake strategies to trick people into visiting a particular website. Google Knowledge Graph is another thing that reminds marketers that they should adjust to market changes if they really want their strategies to work.

Author’s Bio: Bojana Dobran is a researcher and blogger interested in technology and social media. She currently writes for EncryptedFileStorage.com ,a blog covering online computer backup solutions.