Month: October 2016

Knowledge Panels in Site Audits

At this year’s Pubcon 2016, I presented about how I had added Knowledge panels, Sitelinks, Featured Snippets and information from the Google Search API into client’s Site Audits.

I had been doing this because Search Results at Google and at Bing have started showing off information about businesses and site that includes knowledge panel information and richer snippets. I thought it made sense to capture information that Google might be showing off that represented sites, and business entities at those sites and provide some recommendations that might help improve how those looked at what kind of information they contained. The presentation is:

Knowledge panels may be enhanced because of a verified Google MyBusiness listing, a Wikipedia Entry, a Freebase Entry (now terminated by Google), and a Wikidata Entry. This Google Developers page provides more details:

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Learning SEO by Looking at Anomalies

Sometimes one of the best ways to learn is to question why you see something that you possibly shouldn’t be seeing. This can produce more interesting lessons than even digging into things like patents and whitepapers. For instance, I published a post last night, October 4th, 2016, on Context Vectors. On Twitter this morning, Dan Shure had a question about the snippet for my post, wondering why the snippet date was April 10, 2016. I knew the answer immediately.

Dan’s Questioning Tweet:

initial-question

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Google Patents Context Vectors to Improve Search

For example, a horse to a rancher is an animal. A horse to a carpenter is an implement of work. A horse to a gymnast is an implement on which to perform certain exercises.
For example, a horse to a rancher is an animal. A horse to a carpenter is an implement of work. A horse to a gymnast is an implement on which to perform certain exercises.

One of the limitations of information on the Web is that it is organized differently at each site on the Web. As a newly granted Google patent about Context Vectors notes, there is no official catalog of information available on the internet, and each site has its own organizational system. Search engines exist to index information, but they have issues, as described in this new patent that make finding information challenging.

Limitations on Conventional Keyword-Based Search Engines

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