Google's Knowledge-Based Trust (KBT) Proposal

March 2, 2015
Google's Knowledge-Based Trust Approach to Quality

An article by Hal Hodson published in New Scientist has something of a seemingly hyperbolic title, "Google wants to rank websites based on facts not links." But the very first paragraph of the Google Research paper cited by Hodson shows the headline to be fairly, well, factual. This is a research proposal to replace links […]

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Search Engine Optimization with Data

February 27, 2015
SEO with Data

Until very recently, search engine optimization was – unsurprisingly – predicated on leveraging the world of web documents. We've always called what people do when they plug some words into Google a “search”. And it’s been appropriate, because there’s always been a ready answer to the obvious question, “search for what?”: web pages, and other […]

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Zero Blue Links: Search After Traffic

January 29, 2015
Zero Blue Links: Search After Traffic

Imagine a world in which there was still an internet, but no websites. A world in which you could still look for and find information, but not by clicking from web page to web page in a browser. A world where you could search the web from any internet-connected device without needing to visit a […]

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JSON-LD's Big Day at Google

January 16, 2015
JSON-LD's Big Day at Google

Yesterday Google made three announcements which were not only relevant to practitioners of semantic search engine optimization ("semantic SEO"), but which also explictly expanded the role JSON-LD plays in the Google search universe. As the name suggests, JSON-LD is JSON-based serialization for linked data – literally JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) for Linked Data (-LD). That […]

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schema.org Gets Its Game on with v1.92

December 11, 2014
schema.org Gets Its Game on with Version 1.92

Dan Brickley of Google today announced a major new release of schema.org, in beta known as "venkman" (yes, after the Ghost Busters character) and released as schema.org version 1.92. This may well be the last 1.xx version. As Dan notes his announcement: With this update we "soft launch" a substantial collection of improvements that will […]

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A URL for Everything: Google's Physical Web

October 3, 2014
A URL for Everything: Google's Physical Web

In a tweet yesterday, Googler Scott Jenson proclaimed that he was finally able to announce his work on "an open web spec to 'Walk up and use anything." The name of this open standard is the "Physical Web" (with, indeed, its tagline being "Walk up and use anything") and its aim is nothing less than […]

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What is JSON-LD? A Talk with Gregg Kellogg

September 10, 2014
What is JSON-LD?

JSON-LD is everywhere. Okay, perhaps not everywhere, but JSON-LD loomed large at the 2014 Semantic Web Technology and Business Conference in San Jose, where it was on many speakers' lips, and could be seen in the code examples of many presentations. I've read much about the format – and have even provided a thumbnail definition […]

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The EU's Google Ruling and Our Right to History

May 13, 2014
Google and the EU: We Also Have a Right to History

Today's European Union decision that Google must be compelled to remove links, at a user's request, to information about a user that is (somehow) judged to "inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant" is all sorts of terrible. In the several hundred intervening years between the birth of Gutenberg and the birth of Google, millions of […]

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Five Years of Google Rich Snippets

May 12, 2014
5 Years of Google Rich Snippets

Today marks the fifth anniversary of the official introduction of Google rich snippets, announced in a Webmaster Central blog post of May 12, 2009. Google had been experimenting with "enhanced listings" as far back as December 2008, with review and product rich snippets being spotted in results for Yelp, Citysearch, CNET, TripAdvisor and Download.com. The […]

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Google+ Snippet Customization Update

May 9, 2014
Google Plus Snippet Customization Update

Google+, like Facebook, allows publishers to control the appearance of snippets generated when users share a URL on their platform. The way in which publishers can customize Google+ snippets (referred to by Google as "article rendering") has changed since Google+ was originally launched. Initially it was possible for publishers, by manipulating the page code, to […]

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