Google and the end of SEO

By Mark Frary

Heard of Google’s Knowledge Graph? If not, you should probably find out a little more about it.

If you live in an English-speaking country and have made a Google search for a person, place or thing since August, you will have seen the Knowledge Graph in action. The image above shows what I mean. I carried out a search for Paris. Google used its algorithms to make the best guess of what I meant by that. I meant the capital city of France but I could have equally wanted the Texan city, an IT girl with the surname Hilton or the guy from Greek mythology who sparked the Trojan War by eloping with Helen of Troy.

Google uses lots of signals to create its Knowledge Graph, including where you are in the world but also what other people searching for the same thing click on. It made a guess (a correct one) that I wanted to know more about the home of the Louvre and the Eiffel Tower.

What is interesting about Knowledge Graph is how it disrupts our usual response to search results. The information in the panel on the right is generated automatically from a range of different databases, including Wikipedia, the CIA World Factbook and Freebase. Often, the information I am looking for – the population say or a link to something important in the city, the Eiffel Tower perhaps – is already presented to me. It takes my attention away from the listings on the left.

Google’s idea here is to make its search engine appear even more “human”, one of its most often repeated goals.

As a result, travel companies and tourism organisations need to understand Knowledge Graph and how Google generates its results. It means that marketers are going to have to ensure that the organisations they represent are properly identified on Wikipedia and being to use tools like Freebase to identify exactly what Paris or Tahiti or Coral Reef mean.

Knowledge Graph is just one of many changes that Google is making to appear less robotic and one that represents a challenge for those who try to game the search giant through SEO techniques. As time goes on, Google and other engines will become more and more human, meaning that artificial SEO techniques will become increasingly irrelevant.

In the future, internet historians will look back and say there was a point at which it could be said that travel companies investing in good content for their websites started to beat the companies using sophisticated SEO techniques to make rubbish content do well. This is likely to be the point.