The Growth of Direct Answers - How Should SEOs Evolve

March 3, 2015

The Growth Of Direct Answers: How Should SEOs Evolve?

Bill Slawski

Director of Search Marketing -GoFishDigital

@bill_slawski

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Are Search Query Results Enough?

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Do Query Results become Better for Searchers if they include (1) Direct Answers as well as (2) links to Answering Pages?

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Hybrid Query/Question Results

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“Now we are increasingly able to provide direct

answers -- even if you’re speaking your question

using Voice Search -- which makes it quicker,

easier and more natural to find what you’re looking

for.”

Google FORM 10-K for 2014 (For the Fiscal Year Ended December 31, 2014)

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In each case we’re trying to get you direct

answers to your queries because it’s quicker

and less hassle than the ten blue links Google

used to show. This is especially important on

mobile where screens are smaller and typing is

harder.

Eric Schmidt - We built Google for users, not websites (September

6, 2014)

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A patent filed by Google Israel aimed atFinding Direct Answers to Natural LanguageQuestions, Published in November ofLast Year…

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In some implementations, the search

system may perform offline

processing of authoritative sources to

determine and store answers to

common clear-intent non-factual

questions.

~ Natural Language Search Results

for Intent Queries

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Natural Language Search Results

for Intent Queries

International Application

No WO/2014/197227

Published:11.12.2014

International Filing Date: 23.05.2014

Applicant: Google

Inventors: Tomer Shmiel, Dvir Keysar,

and Yonatan Erez

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•Frequently selected in search results,

•Consistently ranks high in search results for queries dealing in the subject matter.

Authoritative Sources

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•How do I treat $X•$X treatment•How is $X treated•How to cure $X

Intent Templates to Find Answers

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A Headings/Answers DataStore is Collected

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•An Additional Chance to be in Search Results

•Being Seen as “authoritative” by being an answer

•An Answer is formatted differently than other results; more likely to draw attention

Benefits of Being a Direct Answer

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http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en/us/pubs/

archive/34460.pdf

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Two Column Tables (Wiki Infobox)

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Relational Tables

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Colon Delimited Pairs

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Introducing Structured Snippets, now a part of Google Web Search

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http://yz.mit.edu/papers/webtables-vldb08.pdf

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•Tabular Data in 2 column tables, relational tables, and colon-delimited lists•Knowledge Bases such as Freebase, Wikipedia, IMDB•Query Stream Data used in an Ontology like Biperpedia - Biperpedia: An Ontology for Search Applications

Sources of Knowledge Graph Info

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Biperpedia –Extracts Attributes

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Answerboxes – different sources

Some are answeredFrom the KnowledgeGraph

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Some Answers comeFrom Specific Sources,Like emergency alerts

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Other Specialized Query Results

Structured metadata extraction

These Results come from Looking for patterns of element lists on pages about specific entities to use

to create a list like this.

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Interviews with Experts?

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SEO by the SeaGo Fish Digitalhttps://www.facebook.com/bill.slawskihttps://plus.google.com/u/0/+BillSlawski/posts

Bill Slawski

searchmarketingexpo.com@bill_slawski

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