Knowledge Panels Gain Where Featured Snippets Lost

Oh noes! Poor Featured Snippets have been giving way really bland Knowledge Panels.

Re-arranging the deck chairs on a well-know boat springs to mind.

If you rely on crowd-sourced content, you are always going to find a fair degree of rubbish in it.

Putting it in a Knowledge Panel is like putting lipstick on a pig.

Read this extract from TWIS SEO News & Updates 1st December 2017.

#SEO #SEONews #FeaturedSnippets #KnowledgePanels #SERP

Key Issues Summary:

• Pete Meyers from Moz has produced an excellent analysis (even using Moz’s poor excuse for a dataset) of the rise of Knowledge Panels in place of the recently disappearing Featured Snippets.
• Essentially, for a lot of broad head terms, the Featured Snippet has been replaced by a Knowledge Panel.
• Often the Knowledge Panel is slightly lower quality than one might expect, although given the broad nature of a generic head term, it’s perhaps not surprising.

Key Actions To Take:

1. If you are targeting Featured Snippet generation, think long and hard about head terms.
2. Undoubtedly there will still be snippets for some of them, but you’d imagine their days are numbered.
3. Focus on the remaining 10-12% of search which generates a snippet.
4. Or contribute better information to the pages which are being pulled from for Knowledge Panel information.
5. Click here to contact me to discuss how to generate Featured Snippets.

Insights & Discussion:

Ahhhh, Featured Snippets, the latest distraction in the ever-lasting game of Google Cat & Mouse. As I’ve said before, a lot of Featured Snippets are uselessly poor.

Head terms and generics are always a bit of a challenge for Google. It cannot really divine a sensible user intent, so it struggles to produce a meaningful set of results, and often produces a stab-in-the-dark mish-mash of information, location, or ecommerce results instead.

Now, imagine if you will, if Google were to slide the information into a Knowledge Panel instead of into the mainstream SERPs. Oh lookie – more space for ecommerce results. How did that happen?

The other issue driving this shift is also some of the Fake News farrago, where information has surfaced from less-trusted sites for contentious, and occasionally, very mainstream searches. If it impacts those searches, chances are some poor information (as discussed previously) has been slipping into the search results. So what should Google do? Analyse the query and pull the result from a respectable, reputable source of information, which can fit nicely into a Knowledge Panel. Sometimes, a butterfly flaps in the Amazon…

More Information:

• Google Gives News Publishers New Knowledge Graph Panels
• Google Introduces 8 Trust Indicators to News Stories
• Featured Snippets Disappearing From SERPs
• Dr Pete’s Knowledge Panel Analysis

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I recently wrote about how Google’s Mobile First is Not Mobile Friendly. Read it now.

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• So, your rubbish Featured Snippet is being replaced by an equally poor, but better sourced Knowledge Panel.
• I’m not sure how that increases the sum of human knowledge, but there we go.
• Maybe Google will magically unveil a Knowledge Algorithm, but somehow I doubt it.
• Read The State of SEO in mid-2017.
• Read about how Google’s Mobile First Index is not Mobile Friendly.
• Finally, get your content ranking well on Google by starting to understand Find Crawl Index.

Thanks for reading. If you would like to discuss what these changes mean for your web property, or would like to know how to implement them, please feel free to contact me.

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