In the previous month, various news outlets highlighted significant improvements made to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. These enhancements enable ChatGPT to engage in web browsing, react to audio cues, and process images. Here’s a look at some incredible updates about ChatGPT, and you’re going to love them!
Did you know ChatGPT used to have a limitation on the data it could use? Well, that’s history now! ChatGPT has learned a new trick—it can browse the internet. Yep, you heard that right! It can fetch you the latest info and even give you direct links to the sources.
Right now, this feature is only available for Plus and Enterprise users, but they’ll expand it to all users soon. Just click on “Browse with Bing” under GPT-4.
One thing to keep in mind though; not all websites’ data will be available due to some restrictions. So, while ChatGPT is super helpful, it’s always a good idea to double-check and edit the info it provides.
This is where things get really cool. ChatGPT can now understand and work with voice and images. Here’s how it all works:
These image capabilities are available for Plus and Enterprise users, with voice coming to iOS and Android (opt-in within your settings) and images available on all platforms. It’s all powered by some super-smart models, GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, which use their language skills to understand a wide range of images, including photos, screenshots, and documents with both text and images
ChatGPT is now your go-to source for real-time web information, a helpful companion for voice conversations and image discussions, and an even more powerful tool to assist you in your daily tasks. These updates are a game-changer, bringing ChatGPT closer to being your ultimate conversation buddy. Use these new features to make your daily tasks easier and more fun.
Google has decided to change the results in FAQ and How-To rich results, showing them less often in the search results.
Google wrote in the post, “To provide a cleaner and more consistent search experience, we are changing how some rich results types are shown in Google’s search results. In particular, we are reducing the visibility of FAQ rich results and limiting How-To rich results to desktop devices.”
After these changes, the primary use of FAQ and How-To structured data for site owners will be affected.
Going forward, FAQ (from FAQPage structured data) rich results will only be shown for well-known, authoritative government and health websites. For all other sites this rich result will no longer be shown regularly. Sites may automatically be considered for this treatment depending on their eligibility.
There is no need to proactively remove the structured data, as structured data that’s not being used does not cause any problems; moreover, it has no visible effects in Google Search.
How-To (from HowTo structured data) rich results will only be shown for desktop users and not for users on mobile devices. However, to show How-To rich results on the desktop, Google uses the mobile version of a website as the basis for indexing. So, the mobile version of your website must include the appropriate markup.
These changes will also appear in Search Console reporting for both of the items.
“In particular, this will be visible in the metrics shown for FAQ and How-To search appearances in the performance report and the number of impressions reported in the appropriate enhancement reports. This change does not affect the number of items reported in the enhancement reports. The search appearances, and the reports will remain in Search Console for the time being.”
In the previous month, Google published a new help document, to assist you in navigating your Google Business Profile (GBP) regulations. If you happen to be a GBP Merchant, it’s likely that you received an email notification about this update.
In their Overview of Google Business Profile policies, Google emphasizes on the importance of ensuring that all content you add to your Business Profile accurately represents your location and adheres to their provided policies and guidelines. In cases where these rules are violated, Google will proactively take action, which could involve restricting the display of content or limiting access to your profile or merchant account.
This comprehensive guide goes on to offer detailed insights into some key areas of Google’s policies and provides explanations for common issues that merchants may encounter. These topics include:
1. Prohibited and restricted content
2. Account level restrictions
3. Eligibility
4. Ownership
5. Posting restrictions
6. Reasons why submitted content may be rejected
7. Other reasons content may fail to publish
It’s important to note that while this document provides valuable information, it doesn’t cover every aspect of Google’s GBP policies and guidelines. For a more comprehensive understanding, Google encourages you to refer to their complete list.
If you’re a Google Business Profile merchant, especially if you’re new to the platform, we highly recommend dedicating some time to studying the help document. It will help you navigate the GBP landscape more effectively and ensure you comply with Google’s
In an unanticipated move, Google Ads has started testing a paid version of customer support for its small business advertisers. And guess what? They didn’t even make a grand announcement. Instead, they casually dropped the news via email to one of the digital agencies. Talk about keeping things low-key!
Google mentioned that this pilot is a result of “customer feedback” and is aimed at enhancing the Ads customer experience. The objective? To ensure that small businesses receive the same level of support as the big fish in the pond. However, there’s a twist in the tale. Google’s statement that they’ll be “building on this strategy over time” has raised a few eyebrows. Could this mean that even the big players might have to pay for personalized support in the future? Only time will tell.
For now, it’s still in the pilot phase, and not all small advertisers have been granted access. But if the stars align, Google might roll this out more broadly post-pilot.
For agencies collaborating with clients in this program, there’s a silver lining. They can schedule specialized paid support sessions, ensuring their clients get the attention they deserve.
Wondering if you’ve been chosen for this exclusive pilot program? A quick peek into your Google Ads interface might reveal the answer. And for those scratching their heads at the £40 price tag, it’s roughly $50US. Currency conversion, check!
The digital community had its say on X (formerly Twitter), with reactions ranging from sheer disbelief to labeling it as “straight garbage.” One comment aptly captured the sentiment:
It’s hard to trust the Big G. The underlying concern? That this “paid support” might just be a gateway for Google to nudge businesses to increase their budgets, even if it’s not in their best interest.
To get the full scoop on this whole affair, tune in to the discussions on X.
In the rapidly evolving world of digital marketing, eBizUniverse recognizes the significant impact of first impressions. With Siteefy reporting about 1.13 billion websites on the Internet, roughly 200 million of them actively in operation, standing out is challenging. The initial moments can either secure a visitor to your site or let them loose into the vast sea of alternatives. The ‘above the fold’ (ATF) content is a crucial factor that can tilt this balance to your advantage. It serves as your digital handshake, setting the stage for all interactions.
As we navigate the world of digital marketing and web design, it’s crucial to understand key terms that shape how we approach our online presence. One such term is ‘above the fold’ content, a concept that plays a vital role in user engagement and website performance. But before we delve into its significance in the digital space, let’s take a step back and explore where this term originally comes from.
If you’re new to digital marketing or web design, you might ask yourself, “What exactly is ‘above the fold’ content?” The term ‘above the fold’ may sound like jargon, but its roots are far from the Internet world. It originates from the traditional newspaper industry.
During the heyday of print journalism, newspapers were often displayed folded up on newsstands, with only the top half of the front page visible to passersby. Editors quickly realized they had to capture potential readers’ attention immediately, so they placed the most captivating news stories and eye-catching headlines ‘above the fold.’ This ensured that the first thing a potential reader saw was something that piqued their interest enough to pick up the newspaper and read more.
Fast forward to the digital age, and the concept of ‘above the fold’ has been adapted to web design and digital marketing. In this context, ‘above the fold’ refers to the content visitors see on your website before scrolling down. This could be on any landing page, product page, blog post, or homepage. Just like with newspapers, the goal of the ATF content is to capture the visitor’s attention immediately.
Above-the-fold (ATF) content — the content that is immediately visible on a webpage without scrolling — holds immense significance. It’s your golden opportunity to attract and retain your visitor’s attention and make a strong, lasting first impression.
In this rapidly evolving digital era where user attention spans are dwindling, having engaging and relevant ATF content can make or break a visitor’s decision to stay on your site or click away. Any digital marketer or web designer must understand and effectively leverage ‘above the fold’ content.
The importance of ATF content lies in its ability to:
Research conducted by Nielsen Norman Group reveals the depth of this importance. Their studies found that users dedicate about 57% of their viewing time to the content above the fold. This means that visitors focus over half their time on the initial content they see upon landing on your site. This placement presents a priceless opportunity to engage your audience and guide them deeper into your website.
Optimizing your above the fold content is a delicate balancing act between aesthetics and functionality. It involves not just what content you present but also how quickly it loads, looks on different devices, and how accessible it is for all users. Here are some key points to consider when optimizing above the fold content:
High-quality images, videos, or animations can instantly grab visitors’ attention. However, remember that these visuals should be relevant to your content and resonate with your target audience.
Your above the fold content should clearly communicate what you offer and why it matters to the visitor. This could be a compelling headline or a concise summary of your services or products.
While providing enough information to engage the visitor is essential, avoid overcrowding the space with too much text or elements. A clear headline, a succinct description of your services or products, and a solid Call to Action (CTA) can effectively convey your message without overwhelming the visitor.
In our mobile-first world, your content must look great and function well on all devices. This means ensuring your images, text, and other elements scale well on different screen sizes. Remember, a significant portion of your traffic will likely come from mobile users, so neglecting this aspect can considerably impact user engagement.
The speed at which your above the fold content loads is critical. Slow-loading content can frustrate users and lead them to leave your website. Optimize your images and other media to ensure they load quickly, even on slower internet connections.
Empty space, or white space, isn’t wasted space. When used strategically, it can help highlight your key content and make your site more readable and visually appealing. It provides breathing room for your visitors’ eyes and helps guide them through your content.
Finally, in your quest to create engaging above, fold content, don’t forget about accessibility. Ensure your website is accessible to all users, including those with disabilities. This could involve using larger fonts, providing alt text for images, and ensuring your site is navigable using a keyboard.
Optimize Your Above-the-Fold with eBizUniverse Today!
Perfecting your above the fold content isn’t a one-and-done deal. It’s a continual improvement process, and split testing (or A/B testing) is a powerful tool. This involves creating two versions of a webpage with different above-the-fold content, then showing each version to a portion of your visitors to see which performs better. Analyzing the results allows you to make data-driven decisions on optimizing your above-the-fold content for maximum impact.
Above-the-fold content doesn’t just influence first impressions—it’s a pivotal part of your overall marketing strategy. It impacts SEO as search engines like Google consider user behavior when ranking websites. Engaging above-the-fold content can increase dwell time, lower bounce rates, and improve search engine rankings. It also boosts conversion rates by quickly engaging visitors and prompting them to take action.
An SEO audit is a vital tool in the digital marketer’s arsenal, comprehensively analyzing a website’s performance in search engine rankings. This process is not just about identifying how your content performs—it’s about understanding the overall health of your website and improving its effectiveness.
Choosing a trusted digital solutions provider like eBizUniverse for conducting an SEO audit offers numerous advantages:
An SEO audit brings everything together, providing a holistic view of your website’s performance. It’s not just about refining your initial impression content but ensuring that every aspect of your site is optimized for success. By partnering with eBizUniverse, you can achieve seamless and effective audits that drive better results and a stronger online presence.
The above-the-fold content is much more than just the first thing visitors see—it sets the tone for their entire visit, impacts your SEO, and significantly influences conversion rates. It’s your digital shop window—a missed opportunity if ignored.
Ready to make the most of your above the fold content? Let us at eBizUniverse help! We specialize in crafting compelling digital experiences that drive results.
Contact us today at 1-800-379-2829, and let’s create a powerful first impression together!
Thanks to a study that was earlier published by Sterlingsky, we learned that if a local listing manages to garner 10 reviews or more, they get a ranking boost in the Local Search Results by Google. The study also shed light on the fact that the recency and length of the reviews play an important role.
Last month, we saw the results of another study being published! This new study suggests that reviews with more than one upvote tend to stay in the top ten for around 100 more days as compared to those with one or no upvote.
Take a look at the chart below that clearly indicates the more upvotes a review gets, the longer it stays in the top ten.
Considering the fact that a previous study conducted in 2021 reported that the upvotes play no role in moving a review up in position, the findings of the latest study have surprised many.
Why This Is Important?
Having useful reviews appear in the top ten is bound to be more beneficial not only for your business but also for your customers. Hence, it is recommended that while asking your customers to leave a review, you also ask them to upvote the helpful reviews they find on your listing.
Are you interested in repairing your online reputation to increase your review quantity? Contact us to see how eBizUnvierse can improve your online reputation.
According to Google, links may become less important in the future. But a recent survey contradicts Google’s prediction. The survey says that links continue to be a critical ranking factor.
The survey anonymously asked 755 professional link builders about how they build links, what works best / worst for them, and what it really takes to make link building work for their business.
This survey was published in November 2022, just before Google’s Link Spam Update. This update specifically targeted purchased links, showing that Google still considers links to be an important part of its ranking algorithm.
However, there is a possibility that Google is overestimating its ability to detect purchased links. Only time will tell if buying links is still a viable ranking strategy. So, for now, be careful and stay tuned for updates.
Are you having trouble keeping up with all the Google SEO updates recently? Contact us and see how we can help you maintain your high ranking without sacrificing your time.
There is a question that is being discussed all over the world now: Can ChatGPT answer all of our questions in the way we want? And if it can, will it revolutionize how we search for and ask for things on search engines? Well, you may wonder, discuss, or throw your opinions straightaway, but Microsoft is bringing ChatGPT’s AI question-and-answer service to its Bing Search, opening a whole new world of possibilities for us to interact with AI in everyday life.
This chatbot, launched by OpenAI, has become incredibly popular across the globe. Everyone, not just professionals, is using it for their projects, research, homework, writing essays, and getting answers to their queries. Some people loved it so much that they called it the “Google killer!” So, is it a code-red for Google, or are we going too far? Let’s find out.
Launched in November 2022, ChatGPT is based on OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 family of large language models and has been refined through supervised, reinforcement learning techniques. It can teach itself how to answer questions by using content drawn from the web that dates up to 2021. However, it has difficulty keeping up with recent and popular topics!
Keeping all that in mind, Microsoft is planning to launch a version of its Bing search engine that uses the artificial intelligence behind ChatGPT to answer search queries instead of simply providing a list of links. This feature will depict a human-like interaction, which Microsoft thinks will help it outflank Google.
So is it really a “Call the ambulance!” moment for Google? Well, experts in the industry are saying no. Google already has advanced AI and machine learning that can do the same as ChatGPT or even better. And to add to this, it has ways to detect AI-generated plagiarism and scraped content. In conclusion, it’s a “Call the ambulance, but not for me!” from Google’s side.
If you receive this message from Google, “Your business profile on Google has been unfortunately suspended, and the reason for the suspension normally is only “due to quality issues” or “suspicious activity”, if you are on Google Business Profile Manager, or “this profile doesn’t follow the guidelines” if you are on Google Search Dashboard,” Google has suspended your account.
Let’s know more about the “Suspended” alert messages from Google and the most common reasons for a profile suspension.
Suspended for suspicious activity:
Suspended due to quality issues:
Suspended because this profile doesn’t follow the guidelines:
Your Business Profile Listing has been suspended because it was flagged for suspicious activity.
Why was your Google Business Profile flagged for suspicious activity?
Normally this type of suspension is due to:
Certain Profile Edits (Business name, Address, Service Area Business, Phone number, Category)
Several edits were made in one single section, and it does not matter which edits were
The owner’s Google Account was suspended
Your Business Profile Listing has been suspended due to quality issues or doesn’t follow the guidelines.
Why was your Google Business Profile suspended due to quality issues?
Normally, this type of suspension is due to:
Yes, Google doesn’t tell the business owners about the reasons why their profile was suspended. Even if you contact support asking for the reasons, they just tell you to go through the guidelines and try to figure out by yourself the why.
Google Business Profile’s support article only advises:
And if it is denied, you can appeal; but it does not tell you how.
Note: Even though the reinstatement process can be very frustrating, please note you should never: remove the profile from the dashboard (you will lose all the reviews); create a new profile (high chances of getting suspended, even if Google support tells you to do it); or submit multiple reinstatements yourself (will only delay your case).
Is your listing suspended? Get in touch with our team to get it unsuspended!
Many business owners and SEO experts had a baffling afternoon on 23rd September, Friday. The reason being the roll out of a fix for the bug that caused a number of businesses to experience a drop in local rankings in the last month.
A local search expert uploaded a post on Twitter about this.
Referred to as the “Kansas” bug, it has been dropping some service area businesses in the middle of the USA — in Independence, Kansas in Google Maps / Google My Business.
However, thanks to the recent fix rolled out by Google, some of the businesses have recovered their local rankings, albeit not as they were before the shakeup.
Why this matters — It’s always nice to know it wasn’t you when it was them.
See How You Can Improve Your SEO!
Your meta descriptions are important for your website’s SEO. Make sure they are clear and concise so potential viewers will be able to get a good idea of what your page is about before clicking through to it. In addition, high-quality descriptions can be displayed on SERPs, and can also help improve the quality & quantity of your website’s search traffic.
Let’s dive into some examples to get better at writing meta descriptions
DETAILS INCLUDED | BAD WAY OF WRITING | GOOD WAY OF WRITING |
Keywords |
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Description for articles |
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Summary of the page |
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Length of the description |
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Lastly, your descriptions should be easy for people to read and understand and should also be diverse, so potential customers can get a good sense of what your product or service can offer them.
In August, Google announced a new big search ranking algorithm update, named the helpful content update – probably its biggest update in a decade.
What We Know
The helpful content update will target websites with a relatively high amount of unsatisfying or unhelpful content, where the content has been written explicitly for search engines to leverage rankings.
Unlike many Google algorithms that get applied page-by-page, this new helpful content update will be sitewide. That means that if Google determines your site is producing a relatively high amount of unhelpful content, it will impact your whole site.
This reminds us of the early Panda and Penguin update days. Just as a quick reminder – or in case you weren’t working in SEO a decade ago – those updates did a lot of damage back then, and we made significant changes to our SEO strategies to recover and protect our client websites.
Which Sites Were Likely Impacted?
According to Google, this update impacted these types of content the most:
This is because content written in those areas has historically been written more for search engines than humans.
These are the folks that were hit the hardest:
Our Observations:
We were quick to run a deep ranking audit of more than 3.5K websites, and we are happy to inform you that so far, this update did not have any significant negative impact on our client’s websites. In fact, we have seen good improvement in positions for the sites we are working on. This implies that our content strategy, in conjunction with our other SEO efforts like on-page optimization and link building, is working well and protecting our client’s websites.
Are your GBP posts getting rejected? Well, that’s because GBP has added more restrictions to its list of guidelines. As stated in their support document under the “Avoid Spam” header, Google warns business owners to avoid uploading duplicate photos, posts, videos, or logos.
Here’s a screenshot of the other guidelines that you should know.
So, using original images & relevant content is the only way to get your posts accepted.
Need help? Get in touch with our technical support team for assistance.
Recently, it has been discovered that Google Maps is emailing customers who have posted a review for any business when their review is flagged as fake and, therefore, not posted.
It came to light after Lucio Laria – Consultant SEO International raised this issue on the Google Business Profile community. When a help forum titled Legitimate review started getting flagged as “Fake Engagement”, he wrote:
Hello,
I just settled my Google profile and asked my client for a review. Google is filing this review as a fake engagement when this person is a legitimate client of mine.
I’m waiting for this to be fixed before asking other of my clients for their reviews.
Why is this happening, and how can I fix it?
Thanks,
Among the many conjectured reasons and suggestions put forth by knowledgeable forum members are the following:
The reviewer received the email notification about 15 minutes after posting the review. As the forum community pointed out, the review was being “filtered by an algorithm that enforces Google’s content policies”.
Why You Should Pay Attention to This Issue:
As we all know, getting legitimate reviews is not an easy task. It takes a lot of effort to impress a client and even more to convince the client to post a good review. It is disappointing when our sometimes hard-to-get legitimate reviews get taken down for “algorithmic” reasons, as requesting the client to post it again can be a bit awkward.
So, it’s crucial to learn how to get our good reviews to stick the better we can prep our customers and clients to get it right the first time.
Google updates its algorithm frequently. At times, they announce the major updates beforehand, and at times they inform after initiating one. The last update was rolled out on May 25th, and to learn about such updates, we had to wait for tweets & official answers from the team.
Google thought of improving this process and has created a dedicated Google Search ranking updates page. With the help of this page, you can check all the latest and previous updates easily.
If you wish to learn how Google improves the search engine, there are several articles from Google to help you. Also, its blog page has more information related to the updates. This page is definitely important for all site owners and SEO experts.
Need more details? Reach out to our support team for assistance.
To help businesses grow their eCommerce site, Google developer advocate Alan Kent recently hosted a video that outlines “8 tips” for SEO-optimizing an eCommerce site.
Here are the 8 tips that Alan believes will help you:
Tip 1: Make sure you have the technical basics in place – You need to ensure your URLs and internal links are friendly to crawlers.
Check out Designing a URL structure for E-Commerce Websites on Google Search Central for advice on how to design URLs for your website.
Tip 2: Create content relevant to users at different stages in their shopping journey – To check the breadth and quality of your site, think about likely searches by shoppers at different stages in their shopping journey. Once you have a set of queries, try them out. Does your site come up well-positioned? What about your competitors?
Tip 3: Be sure to mark up your product variant pages correctly – Product variants are when you have multiple colors or sizes of the same product. Informing Google of the relationship between the product pages can help Google better understand your site content.
The URL Inspection tool can also be used to check the status of individual pages.
Tip 4: For sales events that occur regularly, use the same URL across all event occurrences – This can help Google understand and trust the purpose of such pages. To identify problems, check the URL for promotional event pages on your site.
Tip 5: The “performance” of your web pages matters – Performance is important to users as a page that takes too long to load may be abandoned by them. It is also an important Google ranking signal. It can be particularly important if you use the same supplier-provided product description as other sellers online. The PageSpeed Insights report is useful for checking the performance of the web page.
Tip 6: Wait for it – Be patient to see the results. SEO, unfortunately, is a long game. Some ranking signals may take months to change. Worse, there is no guarantee of success. While it may take months to reap the benefits of a content creation strategy, it does not mean there is nothing you can do until then.
Tip 7: Seek professional help for your website – If you have done your best to improve your site but are still not getting the results you want, we’re here to provide expert SEO advice.
Tip 8: It’s all about the user – The ultimate goal for Google Search is to put the best possible content in front of the users. Algorithms change over time, but the ultimate goal does not. It does not mean you should not measure your site’s performance. It is still recommended to use tools such as Google Search Console and Google Analytics to collect data on your site.
Here is just one of our success stories that shows the importance of SEO! Ready to be our next success story?
As known to most SEO experts out there, Google renamed Google My Business to Google Business Profile last year while also rolling out more support for managing a business profile.
Going a step further, the search engine giant has now launched another feature that is bound to give small businesses operating out of homes a reason to be happy.
Google Business Profile now features a toggle that will allow businesses to hide their business address from customers if they wish to do so.
The screenshot above shows the businesses can now toggle ‘Show business address to customers’ on and off.
Why Is This Important?
This recently launched support feature is perfect for entrepreneurs operating virtual businesses that aren’t tied to a physical location. It can also prove to be quite helpful for all those home-based service operators who wish to avoid customers visiting.
Local SEO strategy refers to the overarching strategy or process used to optimize your site content and online presence for higher rankings. Local SEO strategy focuses on improving business rankings in local search engine results pages (SERPs).
The difference between traditional SEO and local SEO is local SEO focuses your efforts on attracting customers near your physical location — and getting them through your door, while traditional SEO boosts your visibility on a wider scale.
The main benefit of local SEO is that it lets you take advantage of increased visibility in your immediate area.
How does it work?
Google uses numerous factors when ranking local content, but it predominantly focuses on these three signals:
When a user conducts a search using a location or “near me” and your business listing best matches the query, you’ll appear in Google’s local SEO 3-pack — a listing of the top three local businesses that meet the search criteria.
12 local SEO strategy tips to boost rankings and revenue:
In true Google fashion, the search engine giant has now come up with an update for its rich results guidelines. These updated guidelines are meant to better align the rich results content with the overall Google merchant guidelines.
The new guidelines deny rich results for products that are widely prohibited and are known to facilitate harm in any way to anyone. For example, products that fall into categories like weapons, fireworks, recreational drugs, tobacco, gambling, etc.
The guidelines now have an additional section
Google rich results content guidelines, which have already come into effect, have been updated to add the following section:
“Don’t mark up content that promotes widely prohibited or regulated goods, services, or information that may facilitate serious and/or immediate or long-term harm to self or others. This includes content related to firearms & weapons, recreational drugs, tobacco & vaping products and gambling-related products.”
The new policy applies to all forms of markup
According to Google, the new guideline policies will apply to rich result markups in all forms, be it star ratings, prices, information regarding a product’s availability or other such factors. This, in turn, will impact the prohibited products’ structured data markup.
How does this affect your business?
If you are into the business of selling products that fall into any of the above-mentioned prohibited categories, this update definitely applies to you. All you can do right now is remove the structured data markup from your product pages because Google will not show rich results for them.
Although the search engine will not issue any manual action, the removal of rich results in itself will act as a penalty against violating the rich results content guidelines.
For years, Google’s SERPs have been including knowledge panels so users can find the required results quickly. In this article, we’ll discuss how knowledge panels are created and how they work.
Introduction To Knowledge Panels
Knowledge panels/entity boxes are information boxes that appear on Google’s search results page when you search for specific content. The main aim of these boxes is to provide users with the information they need in brief. The content you search for (for example – people, places, organizations, things) should be present in knowledge graphs to appear in knowledge panels.
Only limited categories or entity types (books and book series, educational institutions, government, local shops, companies, events, movies & film series, music groups & albums, and more) are considered for the knowledge graph. Also, only the most relevant or popular entities of every category are included in the knowledge graph.
Knowledge panels are different from business boxes, as the latter is based on Google Business. The best way to spot a classic knowledge panel is by looking for a share button in the upper area of the panel. Also, the entity type is specified below the name & depending on the category, various attributes are assigned & the available content is filled.
The image below is an example of a classic knowledge panel. Google prefers using different templates for various entities.
How Are Entities Selected For A Knowledge Panel?
Google has not given any criteria or procedure to select an entity for a specific category. But we have listed some of the most possible ways that Google uses to create a knowledge panel. Several websites that provide semi-structured data, for example – Wikipedia and Soundcloud, can be used by Google to select relevant entities for each category.
How Are Knowledge Panels Created?
In the Google patent, you can learn more about the basic methodology related to knowledge panels. The steps given below describe the basic process followed to create a knowledge panel:
How Are Images Selected For A Knowledge Panel?
The Google patent describes how images are selected for various entity types and incorporated into the knowledge panel. The steps given below are a shorter version of the same.
The clustering of images into various categories depends on the proximity to the entity as well as the aspect ratio. We can also determine the possible categories by looking at Image Search.
In Google’s patent related to images, the images are labelled with attributes and are assigned to specific entities. These attributes are primarily determined by considering the initial image. Additional attributes can also be added by referring to similar images. It is believed that Google selects relevant images by using data from popular sites (Wikidata, Wikipedia, Wikimedia, social media profiles, magazines, and more).
Reasons Why Knowledge Graph Is Gaining Importance
The SERP features are gaining more importance every year, so it’s expected that the Knowledge Graph will also follow the trend. Since the entities are at the center of the Knowledge Graph, it will definitely affect the rankings and overall search results. To conclude, SEOs should not miss out on the Knowledge Graph when preparing their SEO strategies.
As we all know, Google launches core updates at least two to three times a year. These updates cause a hassle to all the web developers and SEO specialists because they have to monitor the rankings and make the required changes.
On May 25th, Google announced an update via a tweet.
This core update was further explained on Google Search Central. According to this article, Google makes changes to the ranking process to increase the accuracy of the search results. These improvements are called core updates. The core updates are not specific to certain sites but will certainly generate notable effects. Some sites’ ranking may drop, while others may rank better.
Also, Google said that if any site does experience a drop in its ranking, they don’t have to fix anything. These updates are meant to improve the system, helping under-ranked sites to get better traffic.
So, if your ranking suddenly drops, there’s nothing to worry about. You have not violated any webmaster guidelines. You just have to sit back and wait for the next core update. One last thing you can do is observe the sites that have ranked higher and try to figure out the factors that helped them.
Still have any issues? You can get in touch with our experienced team for assistance.
Last month Google laid out new, more specific guidelines to help the virtual food brands and delivery-only businesses with their Business Profiles on Google. These guidelines are meant for food businesses that don’t really have a physical location in an area, but they do re-package and deliver the local restaurants’ food.
The guidelines can be found in Google’s Guidelines for representing your business on Google, under the section Guidelines for chains, departments & individual practitioners.
Here’s a look at what these new guidelines have to say:
Final Takeaway
If you own a virtual food business, it is in your best interest to take a look at the new guidelines so that you can create a business profile on Google that isn’t suspended.
Recently Google’s Dikla Cohen gave a presentation on video indexing, which explains that video indexing does not rely on where and how you host your videos. You can host them yourself or choose from the most popular video hosting platforms and services.
With this, he announced Google is soon launching a new set of reports and tools in Search Console to make video indexing easier to track and diagnose.
With this new launch, the Video Page Indexing report will show a summary of all the pages that Google’s systems find with a video while crawling and indexing your website. At a glance, you can see how many video landing pages were indexed.
Issues will be grouped with a trend line and counts of the affected videos. For example, which videos are missing a thumbnail URL, with reasons – the largest impact ranked on top.
You can click on one of the rows to get more details, such as affected video page URLs. You can also download the list of examples and double-check them. So, you can narrow down the details and understand what is happening and how to resolve issues.
Once your website is updated; and you think you have resolved the issue you were facing, you can go back to the Video Indexing Report, go to that specific issue type, and then use the validate fix button to inform Google.
This way, you can initiate the recrawling of known URLs affected by the issue. And as the pages are being reprocessed, you will be notified if everything is resolved or if there are remaining issues.
But you will have to note that it can take some time to go through all the URLs.
If you wish to check the video indexing status, you can get there by entering the URL of the video landing page at the top of the search console. It will first show you the current status of that URL, as well as the video index status of the page. It will inform you whether Google detects a video on the page. And, if so, did they manage to index it. If a detected video is not indexed, it will list the reasons preventing it from being indexed.
Also, please note that Google indexes only one video per page, even when a page has multiple videos.
To summarize, with the new tools,