In case you haven’t heard, Google’s getting into the content game.
This has been in the works for some time, but the Senior Vice President of Engineering, Amit Singhal, made a more official announcement last Wednesday when he introduced the world to Google’s Knowledge Graph (GKG).
It has already started rolling out in the U.S., so if you haven’t witnessed it yet, it’s on the way to a local browser near you. 😉
What this means is Google is going to start showing more of its own content in the results.
The idea behind the technology is Google wants to take the search terms people use and provide answers and additional facts related to the query.
Google has compiled over 3 billion facts into its database they will use. So you can expect the search giant to dole out more direct answers to searches rather than displaying results to sites that have the answers.
If you think about it, Google has already been doing this in some form. For example, when you type in a math equation, you will get the answer. Search for the population of any city, state or country and Google will tell you the number.
So this isn’t completely new, but their knowledge base is going to get larger and Google will become smarter and smarter.
According to Danny Sullivan, they have gathered facts on the following topics…
- Actors, Directors, Movies
- Art Works & Museums
- Cities & Countries
- Islands, Lakes, Lighthouses
- Music Albums & Music Groups
- Planets & Spacecraft
- Roller Coasters & Skyscrapers
- Sports Teams
So What Does This Mean For Content Publishers?
Singhal claims most publishers won’t have anything to worry about, but admitted some will lose out. Obviously if your site gets found for a lot of fact-based searches that Google now has in its database, you may lose on some queries.
For example, if your site is ranked #1 for the long-tail search, “How many moons are on Mars?”, and Google has that number in its Knowledge Graph, it will display its answer above your site, leaving less of a reason for a searcher to look any further.
So I see those kinds of fact-based searches being impacted the most.
Exactly how this is going to affect content publishers in the long-run remains to be seen. We’ll just have to wait and see!
Hi Lisa,
I just heard about Google’s contents game. This means Google is going to start showing more of its own content in the results.But due to this why bloggers to worry.Google is great and smarter.Nothing is harm in that the Google wants to take the search terms people use and provide answers and additional facts related to the query.
I think Google has already been doing this in some form. For example, when I type a question I will get the answer rather displaying options.
So I think this technique is completely new, but their knowledge base is going together get larger and Google will become smarter and smartest in future.
This is bad news “Google has compiled over 3 billion facts into its database they will use.”
Good post Lisa, thanks.
This is monopoly. Google is trying to be internet government which is too damn bad. Wish, we could do to break this. 🙁
Well this is bad news for the blogger imo, google fuzzing the results to bring you ‘Info’ on search terms, its almost like they are stealing organic traffic right out from underneath our feet, i just hope this doesnt spell the end of decent tutorial blogs being easily discovered
In theory, I think this is a tremendously great idea. If executed properly, this can only benefit the user experience. And that’s all that matters really…giving searchers the best possible answer, or best access to information that they’re searching for.
Now, as James and a few others pointed out above, Google is a business. It’s going to do things that increase its revenue, that goes without saying. But the old adage still rings true: the customer’s always right. And if people (or more specifically, publishers/ bloggers/ content creators) don’t like it, they should (and will) start moving to Bing.
Bing already is giving Google a run for its money, with its social integration, (television commericials), and other strategic partnerships striving for its grasp of a larger market share. Only time will tell, but if Google continues to try and do everything (books, online payment, maps, satellites, social network, etc) they can’t do everything the best…and people will figure this out, figure out they have options, and will eventually migrate to the companies and services that make them feel like they’re worthwhile.
Surely interesting. Smart Google is going to be smarter day by day.
I really have mixed feelings on this. For one it seems like we’re paying for something that should be done anyway but then I can also understand how content can be missed by people who have several hundred Facebook friends and like a few hundred other pages. No algorithm is going to make everything visible.
I probably will use this for when I release my ebook next month. Will let you know how it converts.
I really don’t know whether this is a good news or bad one…only time will tell…hope it does not affect the content publishers adversely…
WEL LOTS OF PEOPLE ARE USING GOOGLE ITS DOING MUCH BETTER IN RANKING ALSO WEL LISA THANK FOR SHARING THIS INFORMATION WITH ALL OF US ……U HAD DONE A GREAT JOB TANK U VERY MUCH .
I see this as being a good thing. If Google is providing just fact type answers that don’t really require anything further this is a benefit publishers. Let’s say for example you have a site that sells math tutoring software, your site would be better off not having people come to it for one or two or three seconds and jumping back to Google once they find the answer. Your site would be better to target people that are looking to understand how the answer is calculated.
I do recall Matt Cutts stating that when a similar video topic is published in a YouTube video Google is trying to show the other sites ahead of YouTube. But in order to get that search result, it’s going to require that sites are including the appropriate meta-tags and data to be identified easily. In addition webmasters are going to have to ensure their page load time is as quick as possible.
I am actually not familiar with this Google graph and I am just thankful you have shared this information for all of us here..
Nice work on this post Lisa. With Panda, Penguin, de-indexing, and the knowledge graph, the rate of change in SEO sure has been dizzying of late.
Hey Lisa, the Knowledge Graph does appear to be a great thing from the surfer’s point of view (provided it does not end up messed like Penguin).
Going by the history of Google in its so-called web improving tactics, Knowledge Graph only seems like an impending doom for content providers.
Lisa, I like this change and I think in the long run it will help us find what we want more quickly. I imagine this will be great for advertisers too. Might be a really good time to give AdWords a test drive.
I’m curious how this will impact video search results. I haven’t heard too much talk about that so far.
Thanks for the post Lisa!
hey Lisa, great article on Google’s knowledge base. Personally, as a searcher who quit using Google because I could never find data like this, I think it is a good thing.
when I go search most of the terms I would look for doing data research, I would wind up with loads of crap that promised the answers and never delivered. Googles best way to combat these seo sites is to make them irrelevant.
I really don’t think they will affect me much since I don’t target those type of keywords often. after all, there is no buyer intent so wouldn’t be profitable for my business.
Lisa,
for the facts oriented sites it will be a hit. I will not be surprised if in the near future they will come up with algorithm to discuss psychology and spirituality. They really need competition, because monopoly is not good for any economy, especially if it is about World economy.
Great post. Thank you.
its gonna burn down wikipedia for sure , i am sure google is playing big hand in fall of Facebook stocks lol
True!
Hi Lisa,
I am so much inspired by your work and you help lots of friends including me. i watch youtube video of yours and really learned a lot. thanks for your support and keep it up.
Good article…
These little content blurbs from Google are relatively short and a summary. I feel most users of google still want to discover their own links to content they want to click on, and not want goggle to decide everything for them. Just my 2 cents…
Just keep on writing good content and you will have success.
Google is like a God in WWW world once they release their new rule or algorithm then most blogger will keep their eyes and ask “What is going on with Mr. Google ?”
Personally I’m not too worried about it as long as I’m still being natural on SEO work, link building etc.
I hope google gets some serious competition.
Lisa
wow this was such a fun article to read, I really enjoyed it, I actually appreciate the change that google is doing because I feel its a great positive change for all of us, google becomes more useful.
I guess this will eventually work its way through. I know I have had some legit sites dinged but hope it clears up.
Good post Lisa, thanks.
i think we bloggers need not to worry about the google knowledge graph as they are now targetting towards the most well known facts. And most of the bloggers are not using these facts to rank on google.
That’s a reason goole is at the top of the game…they’re just great of doing things tobe at the top. Hope this is not a threat for small business online.
Hi, Lisa.
Hope all is well with you. 🙂
My name is Jhara from the Philippines, 27, and I’m currently working online as a Customer Service Advocate for a growing online market place site based in Los Angeles, CA.
Did you know that I do allot at least 1 hour of my day to read all your blog posts here? Honestly, your site is amazing! I also love your YouTube videos. Yes, I’m one of your avid fans. 🙂 I got addicted to your 2createawebsite.com site.
I tried affiliate marketing before and Google Adsense. Unfortunately, my Google Adsense account was disabled, and until now, it’s unclear to me why Google didn’t give me the chance to be a part of their publishers. Is there a possibility for my account to be reactivated? I emailed them long time ago already, but until now, no response from them.
Right now, since I don’t have a Google Adsense account, I’m just taking advantage of Squidoo and Zujava. These sites are good for extra income online.
I love affiliate marketing, and I want to start from the very beginning. May you please give me the link to your blog post about keyword research? I’m having a hard time finding it. I really need help in finding the perfect niche. I’m interested in topics such as English improvement, volleyball, health, beauty, and fashion.
I really need a help from a smart, honest teacher. And I’m glad I found YOU!
Thanks for sharing and helping us to be successful like you in Internet marketing.
More blessings to you and your family!
<3 Jhara
that means we don’t need to make a complete content in the information, because google has provided complete information to their 🙂
It’s not too bad I guess. Most fact based data is not commercialised and shouldn’t be. If people want facts they want a solid reference and Google can do that. It’s when Google begins intercepting traffic to the average Joe’s commerce site that there may be problems for the likes of you and me.
i think it is good for user, dont worry about it at all
This is very interesting! Actually, a lot of people are not familiar with this.. Anyway, thank you for the help here..
Hi lisa.
I don’t think this will make much difference to the serps. I think most of these searches would normally show wikipedia at No1 spot. So it could be bad news for them.
To be honest Lisa, Googles Penguin update has done me a big favour. I have seen a big jump in my search positions.
Let’s hope the future roll outs don’t spoil the fun. Finding it easier than ever to rank now.
Good for you, Steve! It’s nice to hear about someone on the winning side for a change. 🙂
This is my first time of knowing about this. I think google is trying to make search experience a great one for readers. But, whatever they do, they should be careful so as not to cause problem for publishers who have put in more work over the years. I think google should focus on the list above and not extend to other topics.
This is the first I have heard of this we’ll have to see how it goes I guess 🙂
The fact that Google is already blending AdWords into search results so well it’s hard to tell, inserts their own properties as it is (like YouTube and various news partners they either own or aggregate) into the “organic” search listings…and tweak their algorithm to fit bigger brands vs. little businesses (my cynicism showing much? Too much SEOBook for me?)…this comes as no surprise.
What I think will continue to happen, if the above facts don’t already make clear, is that Google will continue to remove the democracy of a neutral web and organic listings, and continue to show us their preferred results.
It all comes down to marketing, IMHO – those with AdWords accounts are of course getting preferred treatment/placement (which makes sense), now that they own YouTube and videos rank highly, it seems more self-serving…
But with the knowledge graph, who but Google decides which results are best? And what drives that decision?
They are, after all, publicly traded on the stock market – hard to say that anything they do isn’t simply directly related to filling their bank account, to the detriment of small publishers trying to fill theirs.
Time to take the reigns on our businesses and wean off getting majority traffic from Google, but that demands learning a new set of skills. I don’t think many current SEO-heavy publishers are going to be happy with continuing in the same vein as the years go on, but that’s my nickel’s worth.
I agree James. I believe the glory days have come and gone and this is a very defining moment. It will differentiate those who are in this for the long-term from those who only stayed only while SEO was less of a mystery. I absolutely love what I do and no SERP update is going to make me stop teaching. Nothing can stay the same forever.
I think GKG will greatly improve the quality of searching for facts using Google.
Though I can’t see this new addition been a problem, Google is definitely in transition at the moment and this penguin thing etc. is just getting started. The search results are all over the place at the moment and surely this can’t stay like this which leads me to believe there is a lot more to come.
Great article Lisa,
I had no idea that you could put a maths equation in Google and just get the answer. Makes sense. I just never saw Google like that but they are becoming more and more like ‘the Oracle’ rather than a search engine – interesting. We already know they are taking over the universe, why wouldn’t they have their own answers to everything you could possible think of 😉
They don’t know what I’m thinking right now though (actually it wouldn’t surprise me if they added Google mind reader to their list of apps)
😉
I still kind of like Google though – they’re taking over everything but they do make things very user friendly and they are quite nice about it (unlike the way Facebook go about making their changes)
From a website owner’s point of view it is annoying, no actually it sucks, because it will cause a loss of traffic as lazy researchers see what Google says and that’s it.
But then part of me wonders how the mass public of general searchers will take to it, will they accept what Google tells them or will they feel the need to do their own research. And then if they’re not happy will it end up driving people away from Google and to other search engines. I’ve already seen an increase in visitors from Bing and Yahoo to my site since Google unleashed Penguin on us and this could lead to more trying out other search engines.
So what happened to Google guidelines on duplicate content? Their “duplicated” content is going to be #1 in the results!
We are living in interesting SEO-times.
Hi Lisa my name is Liz and I´m what you call a newbei, only started out in March this year, three months only, so far I find that it has not been easy, actually I found that tring to make an income on the internet is everything but easy, I have watched your presentations on youtube and visited some of your websites, I think their awsome.
Thank for the heads up, I think that google is gonna make things even harder for people like me, NEWBEI´S
Maybe it’s time to start de-emphasizing Google and concentrate on new and alternate sources.
I’m just getting started, but it seems to me that a person’s primary concern should be to make their web site and/or blog the very best it can be and not worry about the 800 pound Google. I also don’t think one’s primary concern should be trying to outguess Google; to me that’s the wrong priority. (Sounds to me like the party is pretty much over anyway.)
Couldn’t agree more — which is what I blogged about two weeks ago.
I also agree. I just create my sites and do what I think is right and don’t worry very much about Google. However, I’m not making a ton of money either (but I do make some). A lot of people do worry about Google though. For example, I had a link on one of my content sites to another site on the same topic. I got an email from the site owner asking me to please not link to her because she was afraid that having the link to her site would get her penalized by Google. Ridiculous. Perhaps we should all start using an alternative search engine, such as Bing. That way, Google wouldn’t have quite so much of the search traffic and maybe they’d back down a little. I’ve even thought about creating my own search engine, but don’t know if this is a feasible idea.
Some of the searches that I do are just looking for facts and I am sure that Google will be able to help me out there.
Most of the searches I do is for looking for information and peoples opinion on a particular subject, not something I am thinking will be stored in Google’s Knowledge Graph.
e.g. Sometimes I want to know the parts per million of CO2 in our atmosphere (396) but more often I am looking for ways and opions of reducing the levels of CO2.
why would Google not ‘know’ opinions on how to reduce CO2 levels but they would ‘know’ the parts per million? They only ‘know’ it because they have indexed / scraped it from someon elses site. If you find it by searching for it in Google it is indexed in their db and they ‘know’ it. They can’t return it to you as a search result if they don’t have it in their db. The reason they can present facts as their own is because they can’t easily be attributable to a specific author therefore no one can easily say ‘you stole that from me’.
Products will be next.
Opinions etc will follow when they can condense and aggregate suggestions like ‘one good way to reduce CO2 emissions would be for drivers to change gear less when driving, try and maintain a steady speed and use low revs’
to bullet points
change gear less when driving
maintain a steady speed when driving
use low revs when driving
Hey Lisa, I am not worried other sites are my competition so Google will be another one. They want to show the best results so I need to be the best result not complain about Google. I am sure it is cheaper to show quality sites than pay bloggers to create content and what makes them an authority on everything? It will be interesting.
Google will be your competition?? Are they also your traffic source? If they are does that sound fair? Thats like saying the referees in the super bowl are all allowed to come from the favourites team. Plus there is no transparency, it’s a closed system, no-one can see if they are being biased or prove it if they suspect it.
Hi Lisa, what do you think about this? It does seem a little worrisome that they are going to take even more territory for themselves. And of course, they will want to rank their answers higher.
But, is there still room for us little people?
Hey David,
I’m not too terribly worried. Having said that, it depends on how far they go with it. If your site covers a lot of ground and you have a lot of extensive information/tutorials, you’re still going to be able to get found. I just think those quick-answer searches like (What year did X person die) will be impacted the most. Then again, who knows. Google has been so unpredictable lately. As I said, we’ll just have to wait and see. 🙂
Not at all, they’re either a search provider or a content provider, there is no way anyone should be allowed to be both, it’s a complete conflict of interests. Google search their index for a peice of information (your information) that ‘best’ satisfies a users query. Then they show that info on results pages surrounded by ads. At the moment they still attribute that info to you and pass the user through to your site to read full story. Now they are saying ‘well facts are facts so there is no way anyone can tell where we’ve stolen it from, you might have gone and found that fact out from somewhere but because we’ve read it on your site in the process of indexing your site, now we know it so it’s our fact and we’re going to show that fact without attributing it to you or passing that user on to you.’ How long do you think it will be before they decide to do that with products. I’m sure they could do it today but they have to break us in gently, start with facts then move to products. If you search for Mac Book Pro and Google shows you the one you can buy from them above all other listings, $20 cheaper because they can see every other available price where are you going to buy it from. Everybody else goes out of business. Truely insidious.
Google then would be benefited and it will directly hit the publishers or bloggers traffic. However an another example of this smart google is when you type some calculations in google like 87*59 then google will show you answer and i have also used the population estimation and google shows its own results example you given above. 🙂
We will see, how these answers will be relevant to user needs. After last update (Google penguin), SERPs are even worse, than before this update. Some years ago almost nobody heard about Google (there was Altavista, Yahoo, Infoseek).
BR, Chris
True, I’m still finding a lot of unrelated sites when I search. Ahhh yes, the good ole days of Altavista, Webcrawler, Infoseek and all those! Memorieees! lol
Never heard about all these websites even. Although i have read about Altavista when i was in 11th grade.
The only winner here will be google. I don’t really see any winners, only losers.
Winers: Google, Google+ power users – early adopters and OFC users. :]
BTW, I think that, in a long term run, Wikipedia will be googlefied. :]
when google panda & penguin came in internet marketing world then it become more difficult for everyone.
I don’t know. I feel like they are taking too much control. If they had competition, then they would back off.
We will see what happens, but hope its good.
Completely agree Samuel
I’m with you Samuel – they know they can get away with anything. Maybe if FB could intergrate a better SE function on the site people might use that and take a nice chunck out of Google.
Yeah. We need a second browser out there on the market..
I hope Facebook might start something in this arena, but I still think it won’t be solved that way.
Facebook is kinda tricky and it is primarily a social site at the beginning. We will see..
browser? you mean search engine? There are any number of search engines, nobody uses them so nobody gets any traffic from them. The more we choose to only use Google the more we let them take over the whole freaking world. Right now it’s facts so that kills wikipedia, imdb, dictionary.com, etc. etc. How about when they have a database of all products, or all services? Ultimately the only sites on the www that aren’t having all their traffic stolen by Google will be sites that sell a service which is unique to the site owner.
Interesting! I guess we have to see how this goes. I hope it doesn’t hurt too many content writers but with Google you never know.