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JasonDarrell

Disambiguate Entities for Greater Visibility in Search EngineResults

Two things happened to get me into Search and, as a consequence, Semantic Copywriting. One overnight, theother by way of gradual happenstance.

A hip operation went haywire. I loathed my 9-5 job. I’ll leave you to work out which was the catalyst to which.

Irrespective of how I got here, the result was conclusive. It, too, brandished a double-edged sword:

lack of mobility + HSE non-compliant prescription drugs ruled out returning to a normal job;

if I was to retain dignity after the insurance ran out, I had to seek a job working from home.

As a purveyor of short stories and poetry, I had a smidgeon of a clue about the latter. I was, after all, an activemember in critique forums and I’d had poetry published Stateside.

My only doubt lay in the earning potential of such a career. Turns out, that itchy sphincter feeling had roots buriedin much deeper soil.

Everyone online’s a poet, critic or author

You’ve never meet one in real life, but online it seems everyone’s a poet. Every other person you engage is thenext Stephen King or J. K. Rowling. The market is thus saturated. Any chance of replicating the income that 15years in one industry had amassed seemed remote. And so it proved.

I’d toyed with blogging. I had a couple of my own, on Blogspot.com, and a Google ‘Site’. When the Adsense onthe ‘Site’ informed me of the opportunities on oDesk, I thought:

“Wow, what happy fortune is this?!”

I’d no idea back then that Ads render based on scraping third party cookies placed on your hard drive. The Gods,for all I could tell, were smiling upon me.

So, off I popped to oDesk and began applying for freelancewriting gigs. The first assignments I won paid the princely sumof $10/500 words.

Each 500-word article would take approximately 3 hours. Thisnetted down to the handsome remuneration of £2.50/hour inproper money. Ish. A little less, after commissions.

The 5-Star ratings started flooding in, until one day I receivedan “Invitation to Interview”. Wow, how cool was that?

I got the gig, for a UK webmaster, and my rate trebledovernight. By now, I’d cut down writing a 500-word article toan hour and a half. In reality, my income had multiplied six-fold.

Why working to an SEO template is so wrong

Back then, SEO was nothing like it is today. The client had an SEO template that gamed keywords, anchor textand both internal and external links. I knew nothing of how links worked or what they meant. Depending upon towhom you speak today, many may venture that little has changed. Bless little me.

Anyhow, I was to write content, add keywords and embed links in the appropriate volumes. Relevant anchor textwould contain the link, which would in turn point to specific pages. On site, this was primarily the Home page;offsite, they’d point to relevant non-competitor pages. Easy enough, right? Well, I found it to be.

As it turns out, this webmaster had a whole network of sites.Some were his own. Others, he’d built for clients, but hadagreed to continue providing the content to the SEO template.And, to be fair, that spec saw the absolute majority of hiswebsites on Page 1 of SERPs.

We’d risen to position 3 for the biggest industry term forwhich the website he’d engaged me to write was targeting.That was over the Christmas 2012 holidays. We’d alsoachieved a respectable spot on the first page for his secondkey phrase.

These were both 60k/month search terms in the UK. Huge!And we’d reached Page 1 SERPs on the bones of aWordPress template that didn’t yet have its commercial feature attached.

Only two instantly recognisable brands with unrivaled marketing budgets outranked us. Fifteen posts per weekand a simple anchor text-oriented linking strategy was all it had taken.

The King of SEO – Completely

This combination of actions and results had to vindicate his methods to a naive copywriter, didn’t it? And, as aconsequence, I assumed that I must be the King of SEO Content. They seemed reasonable assumptions, basedon Search ‘evidence’.

To further that belief, it wasn’t long before he commissioned me to write for the majority of his online real estate.

Including his client’s properties, I was churning out 54 blog posts, over 30,000 words, per week. Every articlepossessed a bespoke industry voice. I approached each topic or news story from a unique angle.

To those ends – adopting a specific voice and adding value –little has changed in the way we write today. However,disambiguation has become more prevalent since Googlereleased Hummingbird.

Google now has the ability to extract entities with moreconfidence. Apart from that, it appraised the actual contentback then in a similar way to today. Only now it uses othermeans besides links to gauge authority. But more about thatin Part 2, the progression from this introductory piece.

In the blink of an eye, the SEO landscape changed forever.I’m not talking Hummingbird. Although I wouldn’t bet againstsome of the semantic update’s elements being present backthen.

Hang on; let me clarify that. Whichever algorithm was in usefor disambiguation back then may now have become moreprominent. Better make sure I don’t get my correlations andcausations confused, eh? The SEO Police will be on my back otherwise.

Anyway, I’ll never forget the way the changes happened. Twice. In a year.

Who invited Mr and Mrs Monochrome?

We went to The Canaries three times that year, so serious were (are) we about moving out there on a permanentbasis.

On two of those occasions, during our vacation the webmasters received new visitors to their sites. Notcustomers. Oh, no. These fellas drained the colour from our cheeks to match their own monochrome makeover.

Mr Panda raised queries about the volume of valuelesscontent websites were publishing. Mr Penguin took offense atunnatural linking strategies. The effects on the websites – andmy subsequent income – were devastating.

After the first penalties, the number of articles the webmasterscommissioned to write dropped to 29 per week. In hindsight,given their quality, this may have been an overreaction.

Following the second wave of penalties, all but onewebmaster surrendered hope of recovering. Again, ignorancedidn’t help. Nevertheless, once I’d deleted the cancelledorders, my weekly editorial calendar displayed only eightassignments.

Boy, did I hate Google back then? But I’d soon find out, I wasmisdirecting my ire. Flipping it all on its head, the webspamteam probably held a low opinion of the strategies we’d usedto rank, too.

What does Google want from authors, then?

It wasn’t until I met a real SEO that I understood why the template we’d been using had miffed the Panda andPenguin so. Through his study of patents, my new Sensei also helped me understand what Google wants.

Why such penalties were (are) so severe became apparent at once – a true “D’oh!” moment, if ever there wasone.

Google wants a disambiguated web. It wants authors to publish clear, concise content. It wants us to referenceplace names, people names and brands; entities, in other words.

We no longer have to emphasise the context in our content with anchor text. At least not for Google to understandwhat we mean. Indexers (bots, crawlers) can work that out themselves.However, if we could tell Google what wethink of an entity – how we rate it – it would find that useful.

As the semantic web unfolds, our opinions count. How we’ve interacted with others on social media counts. Howwe disseminate entities that (could) appear on the Knowledge Graph counts.

One day last week, I had a revelation, an epiphany. It came as I sought to clarify a document’s “targetedsentiment”. How Google could assign a ‘category’ to content without even mentioning it, per se, intrigued me.

The reasons, it turns out, owe much to advancements in Artificial Intelligence. How algorithms can ‘learn’ as theyprocess information is key to glimpsing where Google’s gonna be at in a few short years from now.

But – and it’s a big but – we can help speed up that process. We can help bots/crawlers/spiders/indexers learnfaster.

Is Hummingbird as new as all that?

I alluded above that elements of Hummingbird were present all those years ago. Why did Google receive mycontent so well and reward it with so high rankings? The topic’s newsworthiness was no different to the articlesfrom whence I’d taken my cue.

My theory, then. If you approach the news from a different angle,Google can index topics with greater confidence. Or rather, if youbuild a story around the entities within the content, you add a newdimension.

In my experience, book authors writing for the web are prone towordiness. However, if we isolate entities by using them in shortersentences, we can help Google understand. The problem is,there are too few writers who:

understand semantics well enough to convert the masses;

can format content to a standard that will provedisambiguation’s advantages in SERPs.

Right now, there are thousands of webmasters posting contentwriting jobs on freelance websites. 99.99% of them are wastingtheir money.

All over the world, webmasters want cheap content. Well let me tell you, webmaster: Google doesn’t!

For sure, you can hire a writer to put together a 1,000-word generic article for $10. But you may as well take thattenner and place a bet on a 33/1 outsider for all the good that content will do you.

Sorry, who told you not to write for the search engines?

Without testing for Readability, you’re in danger of Google exiling you from its results pages. If you’re reliant on itstraffic, that’s a pretty big deal.

Examining sentiment, taxonomies and entities within content is just as important as avoiding plagiarism. These

tests (NLP, LSI and Readability) will tell you how well you’ve disambiguated your entities.

If you don’t edit under the microscope, how can you give Google the confidence it needs to rank your contentabove the rest?

I’ll finish Part 1 with a word about “unique”. According to the Free Dictionary, it means:

“Without an equal or equivalent; unparalleled.”

So, unique content doesn’t refer to copy that squeaks past plagiarism detectors. It means that nothing of thesame ilk exists online.

The challenge – disambiguate your entities

Before you come back for the sequel to this article, I issue you a challenge. It goes like this.

You know that piece of online content you’ve found that you’re about to rewrite? Tell me, how will your versiondiffer from the original?

Are you going to swap a few adjectives, change the tense and rearrange the content’s chronology?

If that’s all you intend to do, the end product will not be unique. Instead, why not consider:

How can you approach the subject from a different angle?

What benefits can you give to your readership that the content’s progenitor missed?

Will you reference any known brands or businesses that are ‘known for’ one service or another?

How will you make who your brands are/what they do stand out in your article?

What reason does Google have to rank your content above your competition?

Write for your readers, edit for search and social. Write first, edit second.

Ignoring either part of the process will consign your content to the unexplored chasms of cyberspace. Get stuckout there and no one will ever find you…