Knowledge Graph product carousel: The mystery of ranking
-
When you search for software-related terms, Google serves a carousel-style item above the organic listings. I've been assuming this is part of the Google Knowledge Graph. See http://imgur.com/a/TQpM5
The mystery lies in the selection of companies that are included in this carousel: the brands included are completely unrelated to the brands that rank well in the "normal" organic search listings. Giving that more color, here are the top 5 brands in "normal" organic search listings, for the query "invoice software," noting where they appear in the carousel: BRAND // normal organic search position // carousel position
- Wave // 1st // not present in carousel
- Quickbooks // 2nd // 1
- NCHSoftware // 3rd // not present in carousel
- Invoicely // 4th // not present in carousel
- Freshbooks // 5th // not present in carousel
Inversely, here are the top 5 in the carousel, noting where they appear in the "normal" organic search listings, again for the query "invoice software":
BRAND // carousel position // normal organic search position
- Quickbooks // 1st // 2nd
- Zoho Office // 2nd // 9th
- Invoicera // 3rd // 15th
- Hiveage // 4th // 30th
- Apptivo // 5th // not present in first 10 pages of search results
Here's an annotated image of the same thing: http://imgur.com/a/0Pa6j
--I represent a brand (I'd rather not mention which) that ranks super well in the normal organic search listings, but doesn't rank accordingly in the knowledge graph carousel.WHAT WE'VE TRIED
-
implemented Schema markup
-
updated Wikidata information
-
updated Wikipedia information
We've reviewed the code on the pages that DO appear in the carousel, and haven't found any common threads.
Several weeks have passed since those initiatives. We've been re-indexed in that time, but are still not included in the search carousel.
I've seen people suggest resources like this
https://searchenginewatch.com/sew/how-to/2299454/4-google-carousel-optimization-tips
but those tips aren't addressing this problem. Also, things like claiming your business or other local business validation (which we've done) don't seem material to a non-local product search (but stranger things have happened, I know...).A couple of SEOs have suggested AMP, but I've yet to see any authoritative info suggesting a link between AMP and desktop results.
Any help appreciated! I will report back on my findings.
This is a follow-up to a question I previously posted here: https://moz.com/community/q/kinds-of-organic-search-results-google
-
I was curious if you found any resolution to your question about the Software top carousel. I am an SEO for a global software company and have noticed our listings in some of these but not others. They are not showing in any tools I'm using to track search features/snippets. I assume that's because a click on the listing goes to another search (of that product name) rather than to a URL.
I've considered adding Software Schema to our pages thinking that might give us a boost. But reading your responses, it sounds like there is no correlation. Have you found anything new about how to optimize for these?
-
Thanks Peter.
We're still on the hunt here, too, without resolution. I'll post when we crack the nut.
We've also reached as deep into our Google contacts as possible, with no clarity.
Cheers.
-
I've seen a relationship between some of those carousels and search volume, but it appears to be more complex than that (and I think there's a Knowledge Graph component). I don't think markup is having a big impact right now, except for highly specialized results (like recipes). Haven't gotten a good answer from Google, though.
-
Interesting. Are you suggesting that Google chooses who to include based on the volume of brand searches that it gets for each brand?
That doesn't necessarily match my expectation of who is already showing in the carousel, but I don't have solid data on it.
We continue to experiment with meta, markup, wiki, etc. No results yet. If anyone else has suggestions, I'd love to know. And I'll post outcomes here.
-
I can't do much more than speculate, I'm afraid -- I haven't seen any write-ups that seemed to do more than guess. Traditionally, the carousel results were Knowledge Graph driven, but that seems to have evolved. Some carousels are clearly based on search volume. See, for example...
https://www.google.com/search?q=best+movies+of+1984
I guess it no longer states this, but at some point I swear there was help text claiming this was tied to search volume. So, the Knowledge Graph is probably providing the movie list, but volume is driving who "ranks", so to speak.
I suspect something similar is happening with these new business listings, but I'm not sure. Google hates when people manipulate search volume, so they're very unlikely to confirm this.
I don't believe this is connected to any kind of schema or on-page markup at this point. Updating your Wikidata information is probably a good step, but not a sufficient one to get into the list (I suspect).
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Product photo links appear in search results
Since I'm new, I don't have any information. Product photo links appear in the search results. Is this a problem? because when you click on the link, it does not take you to a page, but to a blank page with only a photo. What should I do for this situation?
Technical SEO | | UgurKarabulut0 -
Product Listings - is it worth indexing the whole product catalogue?
I'm working on a site that has around 500 product listings. This is for a rental company without any sort of ecommerce platform, so, there's no prices, no adding a product to a cart, etc. Also, there are no different sizing / color options for each product, so each product is the canonical version. After some restructuring, we're starting to see a lot of 404s and just some general mess. I have a couple of thoughts. My first is to just noindex each product. We hardly get any direct traffic to an individual product page, and if they land anywhere related to products, it's usually a category page. If I noindex the products, I don't have to worry about the 404s. My second is to implement the rel=canonical tag on each product to correspond to its primary category. While this is sort of liberal use of the canonical tag, I'm thinking that it could help drive more organic traffic to the category pages. Does anyone have any insight or thoughts on this? Thank you very much!
Technical SEO | | Savage-Solutions0 -
Product Schema implementation
Hi Once you have added structured data to a web page, say adding 'product schema' to a product page how long can you reasonably expect before it take effects, ie. displays rich snippets ? Also in the case of product schema what triggers the display of the rich snippet ? is it a branded keyword and product title search or just a product title search or can it result from a generic keyword search too ? All Best Dan
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Are domain variations hurting our rank?
Hi, I have a client who registered many different variations of their domain name, that are pointing to the website. Now I see that many high value links are not linking to the main domain, but a hyphen variation. So when the main domain is something like www.brandservicename.com The links go to www.brand-service-name.com I suppose they should change all those links (if possible), but does it really make a difference? Thank you!
Technical SEO | | alism0 -
Frustrating Drop in Rankings Despite Good DA
The page below
Technical SEO | | Jayblue
http://www.carefundraisingsupplies.co.uk/fundraising-products/Charity-Collection-Buckets seems unable to budge from a position of near 100 despite previously been around 16 and moving up. We cannot seem to find any issues that are obvious and even some quality link building has moved it down further. Any idease from anyone? The search phrase we are targetting is Charity Collection Buckets0 -
Duplicate Content - Products
When running a report it says we have lots of duplicate content. We are a e-commerce site that has about 45,000 sku's on the site. Products can be in multiple departments on the site. So the same products can show up on different pages of the site. Because of this the reports show multiple products with duplicate content. Is this an issue with google and site ranking? Is there a way to get around this issue?
Technical SEO | | shoedog1 -
Home Page Not Ranking... Need an EXPERT
Hi, for about a year now, our home page seems to have been "removed" from Google (except for our branded keywords). The home page is clearly indexed, but none of the keywords for the home page rank in the top 500 (again, except for our brand, trophycentral). Other pages in the site are fine and we rank in the top 10 positions for hundreds of keywords. We are also okay on Yahoo and Bing. So the issue is the home page from non-branded words. There have been no manual penalties, but since the words, such as trophies and trophies and awards are all but gone, something is going on. It has been almost exactly a year now and I have tried everything from removing backlinks (although I still can't tell which are "bad links", to changing titles, to improving speed and structure. I have had quite a few really nice people try to help, but their suggestions don't seem to work or are too vague. I really need an expert as the impact to the business of not having a home page performing is very damaging. Thank you!!!
Technical SEO | | trophycentraltrophiesandawards0 -
Mysterious drop of website ranking in google
Usually, I don't want to bother anybody by posting silly questions on forums. But this time I really might need advice. My wife and I took over the website maintenance and e-marketing of a local air conditioning company end of March this year. Before that the applied SEO strategies were not very user friendly and a little too search engine focused (spammy keyword stuffed articles, confusing website structure, a lot of directory links). Yesterday night (May 15th) the website more or less stopped ranking. For search terms like "ac repair englewood fl" or "trane north port" and many more the website was on page 1. Here are some more details: I replaced the old website with a newer version end of April. Since some of old the url structure did not apply any longer, I did a setup of around 30 301-redirects in .htaccess. The new site seemed to rank more or less as expected. The homepage has a PakeRank of 1 (seomoz Page Authority is 31). I am working on that but good natural links just take some time. site:kobiecomplete.com still brings up all the pages Google Webmaster Tools notified me on May 12th that there was a possible outage: _"_While crawling your site, we have noticed an increase in the number of transient soft 404 errors around 2012-05-08 16:00 UTC (London, Dublin, Edinburgh). Your site may have experienced outages. These issues may have been resolved. Here are some sample pages that resulted in soft 404 errors:" The listed pages under "some sample pages" are only pages from the old website which do not exist any longer and the 301 redirect was not setup. But this should have been already any issue before, if at all.
Technical SEO | | grojoh
I added the missing 301 redirects and marked them as fixed in Google Webmaster Tools. I had a copy of the website on a testing webspace (root directory of brightsidewg.com). Even though I had robots.txt set to disallow everything and WordPress search engine privacy set to do not index / follow, the website appeared on the Google search results yesterday night instead of the original website (kobiecomplete.com). Even though brightsidewg was a few ranks worse than kobiecomplete.com was, it was still ranking.
To remove the duplicate content, I deleted everything on brightsidewg.com and requested the removal of the website in the Webmaster Tools. Now brightsidewg.com is not any longer indexed (good) but it didn't help the ranking of kobiecomplete.com. Especially the homepage and the service area pages were ranking pretty decent on Google before yesterday night. Now I can not find them at all. Only other less important pages rank on page 8+ No malware on website I did not do any big changes on the website yesterday (only really minor ones). I did not acquire any weird/paid links even though there is a new link from a PageRank 0 website which I did not setup: http://www.indo-karya.com/detail/news/2012/kombise But that alone I think would not be enough for a penalty. It almost looks like that Google applied a partial -950 filter!? I could submit the website for reconsideration to Google and tell them about the duplicate content issue with my testing webspace brightsidewg.com. What do you think about it and what shall I do? Thank you so much for any help!0