Build Backlinks Online has posted a new item, 'Moz Holiday Traditions'
Posted by ssnsestak
Here at Moz, we often feel like a big family. Just like any other family, over
the years we've developed an eclectic set of traditions to celebrate the holiday
season. We'd like to share a few of our favorites and welcome you to join us in
these most joyous of festivities. ;)
Seasons Greetings!
Moz Holiday Traditions 2013 _regular out
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten
hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think
of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but
want to read!
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/a0_k0LQm6jo/moz-holiday-traditions
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Tuesday, 24 December 2013
Monday, 23 December 2013
[Build Backlinks Online] Machine Learning for SEOs
Build Backlinks Online has posted a new item, 'Machine Learning for SEOs'
Posted by Tom-Anthony
Since the Panda and Penguin updates, the SEO community has been talking more
and more about machine learning, and yet often the term still isn't well
understood. We know that it is the "magic" behind Panda and Pengui...
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/MTyr7xmqVmE/machine-learning-for-seos
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Backlinks Online
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
Posted by Tom-Anthony
Since the Panda and Penguin updates, the SEO community has been talking more
and more about machine learning, and yet often the term still isn't well
understood. We know that it is the "magic" behind Panda and Pengui...
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/MTyr7xmqVmE/machine-learning-for-seos
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Backlinks Online
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
Saturday, 21 December 2013
[Build Backlinks Online] 5 Tips to Overcome Your Fear of Being on Camera
Build Backlinks Online has posted a new item, '5 Tips to Overcome Your Fear of
Being on Camera'
If you knew me a few years ago I was so hesitant to be on camera. I may look
comfortable now, but I was just like you, not wanting to put myself out there
online.
I saw every flaw I was spending too much time shooting multiple takes of my
video blogs and doing many retakes. I remember one video specificallyit took me
12 takes to get one to make it right. I almost gave up on video blogging because
it was too stressful and I was spending too much time just trying to get a 2
minute video done.
VISIT THE BLOG TO CONTINUE READING: http://basicblogtips.com
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/BasicBlogTips/~3/quWUaQwlADk/fear-of-being-on-camera.html
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Backlinks Online
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
Being on Camera'
If you knew me a few years ago I was so hesitant to be on camera. I may look
comfortable now, but I was just like you, not wanting to put myself out there
online.
I saw every flaw I was spending too much time shooting multiple takes of my
video blogs and doing many retakes. I remember one video specificallyit took me
12 takes to get one to make it right. I almost gave up on video blogging because
it was too stressful and I was spending too much time just trying to get a 2
minute video done.
VISIT THE BLOG TO CONTINUE READING: http://basicblogtips.com
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/BasicBlogTips/~3/quWUaQwlADk/fear-of-being-on-camera.html
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Backlinks Online
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
[Build Backlinks Online] The Virtuous Circle of Mentorship and Its Impact on Your Career
Build Backlinks Online has posted a new item, 'The Virtuous Circle of Mentorship
and Its Impact on Your Career'
My friend Marcus Sheridan wrote a very forthright blog post (as is his custom)
recently called 8 People That Dramatically Impacted My Life in 2013. I was
amazed and gratified to have been mentioned in that post. Heres what Marcus
wrote: Im going to be very honest here and say there have been times Ive []The
Virtuous Circle of Mentorship and Its Impact on Your Career is a post from:
Convince and Convert: Social Media Strategy and Content Marketing Strategy
You may view the latest post at
http://www.convinceandconvert.com/personal-branding/the-virtuous-circle-of-mentorship/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-virtuous-circle-of-mentorship
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Backlinks Online
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
and Its Impact on Your Career'
My friend Marcus Sheridan wrote a very forthright blog post (as is his custom)
recently called 8 People That Dramatically Impacted My Life in 2013. I was
amazed and gratified to have been mentioned in that post. Heres what Marcus
wrote: Im going to be very honest here and say there have been times Ive []The
Virtuous Circle of Mentorship and Its Impact on Your Career is a post from:
Convince and Convert: Social Media Strategy and Content Marketing Strategy
You may view the latest post at
http://www.convinceandconvert.com/personal-branding/the-virtuous-circle-of-mentorship/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-virtuous-circle-of-mentorship
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Backlinks Online
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
Friday, 20 December 2013
[Build Backlinks Online] The 3 Social Media Lessons of 2013 – And What’s In Store for 2014
Build Backlinks Online has posted a new item, 'The 3 Social Media Lessons of
2013 – And What's In Store for 2014'
This week, we have a very special Year in Review episode of Social Pros. Jay,
Jeffrey, Zena, and Jess Ostroff discuss content, collaboration, free lunches,
predictions for 2014, predictions for 2015, and Mark Wahlberg. Read on for some
of the highlights and tweetable moments, or listen to the full podcast. Please
Support Our Sponsors Huge []The 3 Social Media Lessons of 2013 And Whats In
Store for 2014 is a post from: Convince and Convert: Social Media Strategy and
Content Marketing Strategy
You may view the latest post at
http://www.convinceandconvert.com/social-pros-podcast/the-3-social-media-les/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-3-social-media-les
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Backlinks Online
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
2013 – And What's In Store for 2014'
This week, we have a very special Year in Review episode of Social Pros. Jay,
Jeffrey, Zena, and Jess Ostroff discuss content, collaboration, free lunches,
predictions for 2014, predictions for 2015, and Mark Wahlberg. Read on for some
of the highlights and tweetable moments, or listen to the full podcast. Please
Support Our Sponsors Huge []The 3 Social Media Lessons of 2013 And Whats In
Store for 2014 is a post from: Convince and Convert: Social Media Strategy and
Content Marketing Strategy
You may view the latest post at
http://www.convinceandconvert.com/social-pros-podcast/the-3-social-media-les/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-3-social-media-les
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Backlinks Online
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
[Build Backlinks Online] Building SEO-Focused Pages to Serve Topics & People Rather than Keywords & Rankings - Whiteboard Friday
Build Backlinks Online has posted a new item, 'Building SEO-Focused Pages to
Serve Topics & People Rather than Keywords & Rankings - Whiteboard Friday'
Posted by randfish
With updates like Hummingbird, Google is getting better and better at
determining what's relevant to you and what you're looking for. This can
actually help our work in SEO, as it means we don't have to focus quite so
intently on specific keywords.
In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand explains how focusing on specific kinds of
people and the topics they're interested in can be even more effective in
driving valuable traffic than ranking for specific keywords.
Whiteboard Friday - Building SEO focused pages to serve topics and people
rather than keywords and rankings
For reference, here's a still of this week's whiteboard:
Video Transcription
Howdy, Moz fans and welcome to another edition of "Whiteboard Friday." This
week, I want to talk to you a little bit about the classic technique of building
SEO pages for keywords and rankings versus the more modern technique of trying
to do this with people and topics in mind. So, let me walk you through the
classic model and show you why we've needed to evolve.
So, historically, SEO has really been about keyword rankings. It's "I want to
rank well for this keyword because that particular keyword sends me traffic that
is of high quality. The value of the people visiting my site from that is high."
The problem is, this doesn't account for other types of traffic, channels, and
sources, right? We're just focused on SEO.
This can be a little bit problematic because it can mean that we ignore
things like social and content marketing opportunities and email marketing
opportunities. But, okay. Let's stick with it. In order to do this, we do some
keyword research. We figure out which terms and phrases are popular, which ones
are high and low competition, which ones we expect to drive high-quality
traffic.
We create some landing pages for each of these terms and phrases. We get
links. And we optimize that content so that hopefully, it performs well in the
search engines. And then we measure the success of this process based on both
the ranking itself. But also, the keywords that drive traffic to those pages.
And whether people who visit coming from those keywords are high-quality
visitors.
And then we decide "Yeah, I'm not ranking so well for this keyword. But gosh,
it's sending great traffic. Let me focus more on this one." Or "Oh, I am ranking
well for this. But the keyword is not sending me high-quality traffic. So, it
doesn't matter that much. I'm going to ignore it because of the problems."
So, a lot of times, creating these landing pages with each particular term
and phrase is doing a lot of unnecessary overlapping work, right? Even if you're
not doing this sort of hyper, slight modifications of each phrase. "Brown
bowling shoes," "red bowling shoes," "blue bowling shoes." Maybe you could just
have a bowling shoes page and then have a list of colors to choose from. Okay.
But even still, you might have "bowling shoes" and "shoes for going bowling."
And "shoes for indoor sports," all of these different kinds of things that could
have a considerable amount of overlap. And many different topic areas do this.
The problem with getting links and optimizing these individual pages is that
you're only getting a page to rank for one particular term or maybe a couple of
different terms, versus a group of keywords in a topic that might all be very
well-served by the same content, by the same landing page.
And by the way, because you're doing this, you're not putting in the same
level of effort, energy, quality and improvement, right? Because it's an
improvement into making this content better and better. You're just trying to
churn out landing page after landing page.
And then, if you're measuring success based on the traffic that the keyword
is sending, this isn't even possible anymore. Because Google has taken away
keyword referral data and given us (not provided) instead.
And this is why we're seeing this big shift to this new model, this more
modern model, where SEO is really about the broad performance of search traffic
across a website, and about the broad performance of the pages receiving search
visits. So, this means that I look at a given set of pages, I look at a section
of my site, I look at content areas that I'm investing in, and I say "Gosh, the
visits that come from Google, that come from Bing, that come from Image Search,
whatever they are, these are performing at a high quality, therefore, I want to
invest more in SEO." Not necessarily "Oh, look. This keyword sent me this good
traffic."
I'm still doing keyword research. I'm still using that same process, right?
Where I go and I try to figure out "Okay, how many people are searching for this
term? Do I think they're going to be high-quality visitors? And is the
competition low enough to where I think my website can compete?"
I'm going to then define groups of terms and phrases that can be well-served
by that content. This is very different. Instead of saying "Blue bowling shoes"
and "Brown bowling shoes," I'm saying, "I think I can have one great page around
bowling shoes, in general, that's going to serve me really well. I'm going to
have all different kinds, custom bowling shoes and all these different things."
And maybe some of them deserve their own individual landing pages, but
together, this group of keywords can be served by this page. And then these
individual ones have their own targeted pages.
From there, I'm going to optimize for two things that are a little bit
different than what I've done in the past. Both keyword targeting and being able
to earn some links. But also, an opportunity for amplification.
That amplification can come from links. It could come from email marketing,
it could come from social media. It could come from word-of-mouth. But,
regardless, this is the new fantastic way to earn those signals that seem to
correlate with things ranking well.
Links are certainly one of them. But we don't need the same types of direct
anchor text that we used to need. Broad links to a website can now help increase
our domain authority, meaning that all of our content ranks well.
Google certainly seems to be getting very good at recognizing relevancy of
particular websites around topic areas. Meaning that if I've done a good job in
the past of showing Google that I'm relevant for a particular topic like bowling
shoes. When I put together custom, graphic-printed, leather bowling shoes pages,
that page might rank right away. Even if I haven't done very much work to
specifically earn links to it and get anchor text and those kinds of things,
because of the relevancy signals I've built up in the past. And that's what this
process does.
And now, I can measure success based on how the search traffic to given
landing pages is performing. Let me show you an example of this.
And here, I've got my example. So, I'm focusing beyond bowling shoes. I'm
going to go with "Comparing mobile phone plans," right? So, let's say that
you're putting together a site and you want to try and help consumers who are
looking at different mobile phone plans, figure out which one they should go
with, great.
So, "Compare mobile phone plans" is where you're starting. And you're also
thinking about 'Well, okay. Let me expand beyond that. I want to get broad
performance." And so, I'm trying to get this broad audience to target. Everyone
who is interested in this topic. All these consumers.
And so, what are things that they also might be interested in? And I'll do
some keyword research and some subject matter research. Maybe I'll talk to some
experts, I'll talk to some consumers. And I'll see providers, they're looking
for different phone providers. They might use synonyms of these different terms.
They might have some concept expansion that I go through as I'm doing my keyword
research.
Maybe I'm looking for queries that people search for before and after. So,
after they make the determination if they like this particular provider, then
they go look at phones. Or after they determine they like this phone, they want
to see which provider offers that phone. Fine, fair.
So, now, I'm going to do this definition of the groups of keywords that I
care about. I have comparison in my providers. Verizon, T-Mobile, Sprint, AT&T.
Comparison of phones, the Galaxy, iPhone, Nexus, by price or features. What
about people who are really heavy into international calling or family plans or
travel a lot? Need data-heavy stuff or doing lots of tethering to their laptops.
So, this type of thing is what's defining the pages that I might build by the
searcher's intent. When they search for keywords around these topics, I'm not
necessarily sure that I'm going to be able to capture all of the keywords that
they might search for and that's okay.
I'm going to take these specific phrases that I do put in my keyword
research. And then, I'm going to expand out to, "All right, I want to try and
have a page that reaches all the people who are looking for stuff like this."
And Google's actually really helping you with search algorithms like
Hummingbird, where they're expanding the definition of what keyword relevancy
and keyword matching is really meaning.
So, now, I'm going to go and I'm going to try and build out these pages. So,
I've got my phone plans compared. Verizon versus T-Mobile versus AT&T versus
Sprint. The showdown.
And that page is going to feature things like "I want to show the price of
the services relative to time over time. I want to show which phones they have
available." And maybe pull in some expert ratings and reviews for those
particular phones. Maybe I'll toss in CNET's rating on each of the phones and
link over to that.
What add-ons do they have? What included services? Do I maybe want to link
out to some expert reviews? Can I have sorting so that I can say "Oh, I only
want this particular phone. So, show me only the providers that have got that
phone" or those types of things.
And then, I'm going to take this and I'm going to launch it. All this stuff,
all these features are not just there to help be relevant to the search query.
They're to help the searcher and to make this worthy of amplification.
And then, I can use the performance of all the search traffic that lands on
any version of this page. So, this page might have lots of different URLs based
on the sorting or what features I select or whatever that is. Maybe I rel
canonical them or maybe I don't, because I think it can be expanded out and
serve a lot of these different needs. And that's fine, too.
But this, this is a great way to effectively determine the ROI that I've
gotten from producing this content, targeting these searchers. And then, I can
look at the value from other channels in how search impacts social and social
impacts search by looking at multi-channel and multi-touch. It's really, really
cool.
So, yes. SEO has gotten more complex. It's gotten harder. There's a little
bit of disassociation away from just the keyword and the ranking. But this
process still really works and it's still very powerful. And I think SEOs are
going to be using this for a long time to come. We just have to have a switch in
our mentality.
All right, everyone. I look forward to the comments. And we'll see you again
next week for another edition of "Whiteboard Friday." Take care.
Video transcription by Speechpad.com
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten
hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think
of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but
want to read!
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/id0FsOPvyvw/topics-people-over-keywords-rankings-whiteboard-friday
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Backlinks Online
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
Serve Topics & People Rather than Keywords & Rankings - Whiteboard Friday'
Posted by randfish
With updates like Hummingbird, Google is getting better and better at
determining what's relevant to you and what you're looking for. This can
actually help our work in SEO, as it means we don't have to focus quite so
intently on specific keywords.
In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand explains how focusing on specific kinds of
people and the topics they're interested in can be even more effective in
driving valuable traffic than ranking for specific keywords.
Whiteboard Friday - Building SEO focused pages to serve topics and people
rather than keywords and rankings
For reference, here's a still of this week's whiteboard:
Video Transcription
Howdy, Moz fans and welcome to another edition of "Whiteboard Friday." This
week, I want to talk to you a little bit about the classic technique of building
SEO pages for keywords and rankings versus the more modern technique of trying
to do this with people and topics in mind. So, let me walk you through the
classic model and show you why we've needed to evolve.
So, historically, SEO has really been about keyword rankings. It's "I want to
rank well for this keyword because that particular keyword sends me traffic that
is of high quality. The value of the people visiting my site from that is high."
The problem is, this doesn't account for other types of traffic, channels, and
sources, right? We're just focused on SEO.
This can be a little bit problematic because it can mean that we ignore
things like social and content marketing opportunities and email marketing
opportunities. But, okay. Let's stick with it. In order to do this, we do some
keyword research. We figure out which terms and phrases are popular, which ones
are high and low competition, which ones we expect to drive high-quality
traffic.
We create some landing pages for each of these terms and phrases. We get
links. And we optimize that content so that hopefully, it performs well in the
search engines. And then we measure the success of this process based on both
the ranking itself. But also, the keywords that drive traffic to those pages.
And whether people who visit coming from those keywords are high-quality
visitors.
And then we decide "Yeah, I'm not ranking so well for this keyword. But gosh,
it's sending great traffic. Let me focus more on this one." Or "Oh, I am ranking
well for this. But the keyword is not sending me high-quality traffic. So, it
doesn't matter that much. I'm going to ignore it because of the problems."
So, a lot of times, creating these landing pages with each particular term
and phrase is doing a lot of unnecessary overlapping work, right? Even if you're
not doing this sort of hyper, slight modifications of each phrase. "Brown
bowling shoes," "red bowling shoes," "blue bowling shoes." Maybe you could just
have a bowling shoes page and then have a list of colors to choose from. Okay.
But even still, you might have "bowling shoes" and "shoes for going bowling."
And "shoes for indoor sports," all of these different kinds of things that could
have a considerable amount of overlap. And many different topic areas do this.
The problem with getting links and optimizing these individual pages is that
you're only getting a page to rank for one particular term or maybe a couple of
different terms, versus a group of keywords in a topic that might all be very
well-served by the same content, by the same landing page.
And by the way, because you're doing this, you're not putting in the same
level of effort, energy, quality and improvement, right? Because it's an
improvement into making this content better and better. You're just trying to
churn out landing page after landing page.
And then, if you're measuring success based on the traffic that the keyword
is sending, this isn't even possible anymore. Because Google has taken away
keyword referral data and given us (not provided) instead.
And this is why we're seeing this big shift to this new model, this more
modern model, where SEO is really about the broad performance of search traffic
across a website, and about the broad performance of the pages receiving search
visits. So, this means that I look at a given set of pages, I look at a section
of my site, I look at content areas that I'm investing in, and I say "Gosh, the
visits that come from Google, that come from Bing, that come from Image Search,
whatever they are, these are performing at a high quality, therefore, I want to
invest more in SEO." Not necessarily "Oh, look. This keyword sent me this good
traffic."
I'm still doing keyword research. I'm still using that same process, right?
Where I go and I try to figure out "Okay, how many people are searching for this
term? Do I think they're going to be high-quality visitors? And is the
competition low enough to where I think my website can compete?"
I'm going to then define groups of terms and phrases that can be well-served
by that content. This is very different. Instead of saying "Blue bowling shoes"
and "Brown bowling shoes," I'm saying, "I think I can have one great page around
bowling shoes, in general, that's going to serve me really well. I'm going to
have all different kinds, custom bowling shoes and all these different things."
And maybe some of them deserve their own individual landing pages, but
together, this group of keywords can be served by this page. And then these
individual ones have their own targeted pages.
From there, I'm going to optimize for two things that are a little bit
different than what I've done in the past. Both keyword targeting and being able
to earn some links. But also, an opportunity for amplification.
That amplification can come from links. It could come from email marketing,
it could come from social media. It could come from word-of-mouth. But,
regardless, this is the new fantastic way to earn those signals that seem to
correlate with things ranking well.
Links are certainly one of them. But we don't need the same types of direct
anchor text that we used to need. Broad links to a website can now help increase
our domain authority, meaning that all of our content ranks well.
Google certainly seems to be getting very good at recognizing relevancy of
particular websites around topic areas. Meaning that if I've done a good job in
the past of showing Google that I'm relevant for a particular topic like bowling
shoes. When I put together custom, graphic-printed, leather bowling shoes pages,
that page might rank right away. Even if I haven't done very much work to
specifically earn links to it and get anchor text and those kinds of things,
because of the relevancy signals I've built up in the past. And that's what this
process does.
And now, I can measure success based on how the search traffic to given
landing pages is performing. Let me show you an example of this.
And here, I've got my example. So, I'm focusing beyond bowling shoes. I'm
going to go with "Comparing mobile phone plans," right? So, let's say that
you're putting together a site and you want to try and help consumers who are
looking at different mobile phone plans, figure out which one they should go
with, great.
So, "Compare mobile phone plans" is where you're starting. And you're also
thinking about 'Well, okay. Let me expand beyond that. I want to get broad
performance." And so, I'm trying to get this broad audience to target. Everyone
who is interested in this topic. All these consumers.
And so, what are things that they also might be interested in? And I'll do
some keyword research and some subject matter research. Maybe I'll talk to some
experts, I'll talk to some consumers. And I'll see providers, they're looking
for different phone providers. They might use synonyms of these different terms.
They might have some concept expansion that I go through as I'm doing my keyword
research.
Maybe I'm looking for queries that people search for before and after. So,
after they make the determination if they like this particular provider, then
they go look at phones. Or after they determine they like this phone, they want
to see which provider offers that phone. Fine, fair.
So, now, I'm going to do this definition of the groups of keywords that I
care about. I have comparison in my providers. Verizon, T-Mobile, Sprint, AT&T.
Comparison of phones, the Galaxy, iPhone, Nexus, by price or features. What
about people who are really heavy into international calling or family plans or
travel a lot? Need data-heavy stuff or doing lots of tethering to their laptops.
So, this type of thing is what's defining the pages that I might build by the
searcher's intent. When they search for keywords around these topics, I'm not
necessarily sure that I'm going to be able to capture all of the keywords that
they might search for and that's okay.
I'm going to take these specific phrases that I do put in my keyword
research. And then, I'm going to expand out to, "All right, I want to try and
have a page that reaches all the people who are looking for stuff like this."
And Google's actually really helping you with search algorithms like
Hummingbird, where they're expanding the definition of what keyword relevancy
and keyword matching is really meaning.
So, now, I'm going to go and I'm going to try and build out these pages. So,
I've got my phone plans compared. Verizon versus T-Mobile versus AT&T versus
Sprint. The showdown.
And that page is going to feature things like "I want to show the price of
the services relative to time over time. I want to show which phones they have
available." And maybe pull in some expert ratings and reviews for those
particular phones. Maybe I'll toss in CNET's rating on each of the phones and
link over to that.
What add-ons do they have? What included services? Do I maybe want to link
out to some expert reviews? Can I have sorting so that I can say "Oh, I only
want this particular phone. So, show me only the providers that have got that
phone" or those types of things.
And then, I'm going to take this and I'm going to launch it. All this stuff,
all these features are not just there to help be relevant to the search query.
They're to help the searcher and to make this worthy of amplification.
And then, I can use the performance of all the search traffic that lands on
any version of this page. So, this page might have lots of different URLs based
on the sorting or what features I select or whatever that is. Maybe I rel
canonical them or maybe I don't, because I think it can be expanded out and
serve a lot of these different needs. And that's fine, too.
But this, this is a great way to effectively determine the ROI that I've
gotten from producing this content, targeting these searchers. And then, I can
look at the value from other channels in how search impacts social and social
impacts search by looking at multi-channel and multi-touch. It's really, really
cool.
So, yes. SEO has gotten more complex. It's gotten harder. There's a little
bit of disassociation away from just the keyword and the ranking. But this
process still really works and it's still very powerful. And I think SEOs are
going to be using this for a long time to come. We just have to have a switch in
our mentality.
All right, everyone. I look forward to the comments. And we'll see you again
next week for another edition of "Whiteboard Friday." Take care.
Video transcription by Speechpad.com
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten
hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think
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Thursday, 19 December 2013
[Build Backlinks Online] I Am an Entity: Hacking the Knowledge Graph
Build Backlinks Online has posted a new item, 'I Am an Entity: Hacking the
Knowledge Graph'
Posted by Andrew_IsidoroThis post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to
the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The
author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of Moz,
Inc.
For a long time Google has algorithmically led users towards web pages based
on search strings, yet over the past few years, we've seen many changes which
are leading to a more data-driven model of semantic search.
In 2010 Google hit a milestone with its acquisition of Metaweb and its
semantic database now known as Freebase. This database helps to make up the
Knowledge Graph; an archive of over 570 million of the most searched-for people,
places and things (entities), including around 18 billion cross-references. A
truly impressive demonstration of what a semantic search engine with structured
data can bring to the everyday user.
What has changed?
The surge of Knowledge Graph entries picked up by Dr Pete a few weeks ago
indicates a huge change in the algorithm. Google has been attempting to
establish a deep associative context around the entities to try and understand
the query rather than just regurgitate what it believes is the closest result
for some time, but this has been focused on a very tight dataset reserved for
high profile people, places and things.
It seems that has changed.
Over the past few weeks, while looking into how the Knowledge Graph pulls data
for certain sources, I have made a few general observations and have been
tracking what, if any, impact certain practices have on the display of
information panels.
If I'm being brutally honest, this experiment was to scratch a personal
"itch." I was interested in the constructs of the Knowledge Graph over anything
else, which is why I was so surprised that a few weeks ago I began to see this:
It seems that anyone now wishing to find out "Andrew Isidoro's Age" could now
be greeted with not only my age but also my date of birth in an information
panel. After a few well-planned boasts to my girlfriend about my new found fame
(all of which were dismissed as "slightly sad and geeky"), I began to probe
further and found that this was by no means the only piece of information that
Google could supply users about me.
It also displayed data such as my place of birth and my Job. It could even
answer natural language queries and connect me to other entities like in queries
such as: "Where did Andrew Isidoro go to school?"
and somewhat creepily, "Who are Andrew Isidoro's parents?".
Many of you may now be a little scared about your own personal privacy, but I
have a confession to make. Though I am by no means a celebrity, I do have a
Freebase profile. The information that I have inputted into this is now
available for all to see as a part of Google's search product.
I've already written about the implications of privacy so I'll gloss over the
ethics for a moment and get right into the mechanics.
How are entities born?
Disclaimer: I'm a long-time user of and contributor to Freebase, I've written
about its potential uses in search many times and the below represents my
opinion based on externally-visible interactions with Freebase and other Google
products.
After taking some time to study the subject, there seems to be a structure
around how entities are initiated within the Knowledge Graph:
Affinity
As anyone who works with external data will tell you, one of the most
challenging tasks is identifying the levels of trust within a data-set. Google
is not different here; to be able to offer a definitive answer to a query, they
must be confident of its reliability.
After a few experiments with Freebase data, it seems clear that Google are
pretty damn sure the string "Andrew Isidoro" is me. There are a few potential
reasons for this:
Provenance
To take a definition from W3C:
"Provenance is information about entities, activities, and people involved in
producing a piece of data or thing, which can be used to form assessments about
its quality, reliability or trustworthiness."
In summary, provenance is the 'who'. It's about finding the original author,
editor and maintainer of data; and through that information Google can begin to
make judgements about their data's credibility.
Google has been very smart with their structuring of Freebase user accounts.
To login to your account you are asked to sign in via Google; which of course
gives the search giant access to your personal details, and may offer a source
of data provenance from a user's Google+ profile.
Freebase Topic pages also allow us to link a Freebase user profile through the
"Users Who Say They Are This Person" property. This begins to add provenance to
the inputted data and, depending on the source, could add further trust.
External structured data
Recently an area of tremendous growth in material for SEOs has been structured
data. Understanding the schema.org vocabulary has become a big part of our roles
within search but there is still much that isn't being experimented with.
Once Google crawls web pages with structured markup, it can easily extract and
understand structured data based on the markup tags and add it to the Knowledge
Graph.
No property has been more overlooked in the last few months than the sameAs
relationship. Google has long used two-way verification to authenticate web
properties, and even explicitly recommends using sameAs with Freebase within its
documentation; so why wouldn't I try and link my personal webpage (complete with
person and location markup) to my Freebase profile? I used a simple itemprop to
exhibit the relationship on my personal blog:
<link itemprop="sameAs" href="<a href="http://www.freebase.com/m/0py84hb"
>http://www.freebase.com/m/0py84hb</a>">Andrew Isidoro</a>
Finally, my name is by no means common; according to howmanyofme.com there are
just 2 people in the U.S. named Andrew Isidoro. What's more, I am the only
person with my name in the Freebase database, which massively reduces the amount
of noise when looking for an entity related to a query for my name.
Data sources
Over the past few months, I have written many times about the Knowledge Graph
and have had conversations with some fantastic people around how Google decides
which queries to show information panels for.
Google uses a number of data sources and it seems that each panel template
requires a number of separate data sources to initiate. However, I believe that
it is less an information retrieval exercise and more of a verification of data.
Take my age panel example; this information is in the Freebase database yet in
order to have the necessary trust in the result, Google must verify it against a
secondary source. In their patent for the Knowledge Graph, they constantly make
reference to multiple sources of panel data:
"Content including at least one content item obtained from a first resource and
at least one second content item obtained from a second resource different than
the first resource"
These resources could include any entity provided to Google's crawlers as
structured data, including code marked up with microformats, microdata or RDFa;
all of which, when used to their full potential, are particularly good at making
relationships between themselves and other resources.
The Knowledge Graph panels access several databases dynamically to identify
content items, and it is important to understand that I have only been looking
at initiating the Knowledge Graph for a person, not for any other type of panel
template. As always, correlation â causation; however it does seem that
Freebase is a major player in a number of trusted sources that Google uses to
form Knowledge Graph panels.
Search behaviour
As for influencing what might appear in a knowledge panel, there are a lot of
different potential sources that information might come from that go beyond just
what we might think of when we think of knowledge bases.
Bill Slawski has written on what may affect data within panels; most notably
that Google query and click logs are likely being used to see what people are
interested in when they perform searches related to an entity. Google search
results might also be used to unveil aspects and attributes that might be
related to an entity as well.
For example, search for "David Beckham", and scan through the titles and
descriptions for the top 100 search results, and you may see certain terms and
phrases appearing frequently. It's probably not a coincidence that his salary is
shown within the Knowledge Graph panel when "David Beckham Net Worth" is the top
auto suggest result for his name.
Why now?
Dr Pete wrote a fantastic post a few weeks ago on "The Day the Knowledge Graph
Exploded" which highlights what I am beginning to believe was a major turning
point in the way Google displays data within panels.
However, where Dr Pete's "gut feeling is that Google has bumped up the volume
on the Knowledge Graph, letting KG entries appear more frequently," I believe
that there was a change in the way they determine the quality of their data. A
reduction in affinity threshold needed to display information.
For example, not only did we see an increase in the number of panels displayed
but we began to see a few errors in the data:
This error can be traced back to a rogue Freebase entry added in December 2012
(almost a year ago) that sat unnoticed until this "update" put it into the
public domain. This suggests that some sort of editorial control was relaxed to
allow this information to show, and that Freebase can be used as a single source
of data.
For person-based panels, my inclusion seems to show a new era of Knowledge
Graph that Dr Pete reported a few weeks ago. We can see that new "things" are
being discovered as strings then, using data, free text extraction and natural
language processing tools, Google is able to aggregate, clean, normalize and
structure information from Freebase and the search index, with the appropriate
schema and relational graphs, to create entities.
Despite the brash headline, this post is a single experiment and should not be
treated as gospel. Instead, let's use this as a chance to generate discussion
around the changes to the Knowledge Graph, for us to start thinking about our
own hypotheses and begin to test them. Please leave any thoughts or comments
below.
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten
hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think
of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but
want to read!
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/9wwqJPILyTc/i-am-an-entity-hacking-the-knowledge-graph
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Backlinks Online
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
Knowledge Graph'
Posted by Andrew_IsidoroThis post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to
the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The
author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of Moz,
Inc.
For a long time Google has algorithmically led users towards web pages based
on search strings, yet over the past few years, we've seen many changes which
are leading to a more data-driven model of semantic search.
In 2010 Google hit a milestone with its acquisition of Metaweb and its
semantic database now known as Freebase. This database helps to make up the
Knowledge Graph; an archive of over 570 million of the most searched-for people,
places and things (entities), including around 18 billion cross-references. A
truly impressive demonstration of what a semantic search engine with structured
data can bring to the everyday user.
What has changed?
The surge of Knowledge Graph entries picked up by Dr Pete a few weeks ago
indicates a huge change in the algorithm. Google has been attempting to
establish a deep associative context around the entities to try and understand
the query rather than just regurgitate what it believes is the closest result
for some time, but this has been focused on a very tight dataset reserved for
high profile people, places and things.
It seems that has changed.
Over the past few weeks, while looking into how the Knowledge Graph pulls data
for certain sources, I have made a few general observations and have been
tracking what, if any, impact certain practices have on the display of
information panels.
If I'm being brutally honest, this experiment was to scratch a personal
"itch." I was interested in the constructs of the Knowledge Graph over anything
else, which is why I was so surprised that a few weeks ago I began to see this:
It seems that anyone now wishing to find out "Andrew Isidoro's Age" could now
be greeted with not only my age but also my date of birth in an information
panel. After a few well-planned boasts to my girlfriend about my new found fame
(all of which were dismissed as "slightly sad and geeky"), I began to probe
further and found that this was by no means the only piece of information that
Google could supply users about me.
It also displayed data such as my place of birth and my Job. It could even
answer natural language queries and connect me to other entities like in queries
such as: "Where did Andrew Isidoro go to school?"
and somewhat creepily, "Who are Andrew Isidoro's parents?".
Many of you may now be a little scared about your own personal privacy, but I
have a confession to make. Though I am by no means a celebrity, I do have a
Freebase profile. The information that I have inputted into this is now
available for all to see as a part of Google's search product.
I've already written about the implications of privacy so I'll gloss over the
ethics for a moment and get right into the mechanics.
How are entities born?
Disclaimer: I'm a long-time user of and contributor to Freebase, I've written
about its potential uses in search many times and the below represents my
opinion based on externally-visible interactions with Freebase and other Google
products.
After taking some time to study the subject, there seems to be a structure
around how entities are initiated within the Knowledge Graph:
Affinity
As anyone who works with external data will tell you, one of the most
challenging tasks is identifying the levels of trust within a data-set. Google
is not different here; to be able to offer a definitive answer to a query, they
must be confident of its reliability.
After a few experiments with Freebase data, it seems clear that Google are
pretty damn sure the string "Andrew Isidoro" is me. There are a few potential
reasons for this:
Provenance
To take a definition from W3C:
"Provenance is information about entities, activities, and people involved in
producing a piece of data or thing, which can be used to form assessments about
its quality, reliability or trustworthiness."
In summary, provenance is the 'who'. It's about finding the original author,
editor and maintainer of data; and through that information Google can begin to
make judgements about their data's credibility.
Google has been very smart with their structuring of Freebase user accounts.
To login to your account you are asked to sign in via Google; which of course
gives the search giant access to your personal details, and may offer a source
of data provenance from a user's Google+ profile.
Freebase Topic pages also allow us to link a Freebase user profile through the
"Users Who Say They Are This Person" property. This begins to add provenance to
the inputted data and, depending on the source, could add further trust.
External structured data
Recently an area of tremendous growth in material for SEOs has been structured
data. Understanding the schema.org vocabulary has become a big part of our roles
within search but there is still much that isn't being experimented with.
Once Google crawls web pages with structured markup, it can easily extract and
understand structured data based on the markup tags and add it to the Knowledge
Graph.
No property has been more overlooked in the last few months than the sameAs
relationship. Google has long used two-way verification to authenticate web
properties, and even explicitly recommends using sameAs with Freebase within its
documentation; so why wouldn't I try and link my personal webpage (complete with
person and location markup) to my Freebase profile? I used a simple itemprop to
exhibit the relationship on my personal blog:
<link itemprop="sameAs" href="<a href="http://www.freebase.com/m/0py84hb"
>http://www.freebase.com/m/0py84hb</a>">Andrew Isidoro</a>
Finally, my name is by no means common; according to howmanyofme.com there are
just 2 people in the U.S. named Andrew Isidoro. What's more, I am the only
person with my name in the Freebase database, which massively reduces the amount
of noise when looking for an entity related to a query for my name.
Data sources
Over the past few months, I have written many times about the Knowledge Graph
and have had conversations with some fantastic people around how Google decides
which queries to show information panels for.
Google uses a number of data sources and it seems that each panel template
requires a number of separate data sources to initiate. However, I believe that
it is less an information retrieval exercise and more of a verification of data.
Take my age panel example; this information is in the Freebase database yet in
order to have the necessary trust in the result, Google must verify it against a
secondary source. In their patent for the Knowledge Graph, they constantly make
reference to multiple sources of panel data:
"Content including at least one content item obtained from a first resource and
at least one second content item obtained from a second resource different than
the first resource"
These resources could include any entity provided to Google's crawlers as
structured data, including code marked up with microformats, microdata or RDFa;
all of which, when used to their full potential, are particularly good at making
relationships between themselves and other resources.
The Knowledge Graph panels access several databases dynamically to identify
content items, and it is important to understand that I have only been looking
at initiating the Knowledge Graph for a person, not for any other type of panel
template. As always, correlation â causation; however it does seem that
Freebase is a major player in a number of trusted sources that Google uses to
form Knowledge Graph panels.
Search behaviour
As for influencing what might appear in a knowledge panel, there are a lot of
different potential sources that information might come from that go beyond just
what we might think of when we think of knowledge bases.
Bill Slawski has written on what may affect data within panels; most notably
that Google query and click logs are likely being used to see what people are
interested in when they perform searches related to an entity. Google search
results might also be used to unveil aspects and attributes that might be
related to an entity as well.
For example, search for "David Beckham", and scan through the titles and
descriptions for the top 100 search results, and you may see certain terms and
phrases appearing frequently. It's probably not a coincidence that his salary is
shown within the Knowledge Graph panel when "David Beckham Net Worth" is the top
auto suggest result for his name.
Why now?
Dr Pete wrote a fantastic post a few weeks ago on "The Day the Knowledge Graph
Exploded" which highlights what I am beginning to believe was a major turning
point in the way Google displays data within panels.
However, where Dr Pete's "gut feeling is that Google has bumped up the volume
on the Knowledge Graph, letting KG entries appear more frequently," I believe
that there was a change in the way they determine the quality of their data. A
reduction in affinity threshold needed to display information.
For example, not only did we see an increase in the number of panels displayed
but we began to see a few errors in the data:
This error can be traced back to a rogue Freebase entry added in December 2012
(almost a year ago) that sat unnoticed until this "update" put it into the
public domain. This suggests that some sort of editorial control was relaxed to
allow this information to show, and that Freebase can be used as a single source
of data.
For person-based panels, my inclusion seems to show a new era of Knowledge
Graph that Dr Pete reported a few weeks ago. We can see that new "things" are
being discovered as strings then, using data, free text extraction and natural
language processing tools, Google is able to aggregate, clean, normalize and
structure information from Freebase and the search index, with the appropriate
schema and relational graphs, to create entities.
Despite the brash headline, this post is a single experiment and should not be
treated as gospel. Instead, let's use this as a chance to generate discussion
around the changes to the Knowledge Graph, for us to start thinking about our
own hypotheses and begin to test them. Please leave any thoughts or comments
below.
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten
hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think
of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but
want to read!
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/9wwqJPILyTc/i-am-an-entity-hacking-the-knowledge-graph
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Backlinks Online
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
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