Google’s understanding of entities is the search engine’s ability to make sense of the information on the internet not through words alone, but through the relationships between real world objects and concepts, which is to say entities. It is what lets Google make its results more relevant and more contextual, read user intent better, and serve richer and fuller information through the knowledge graph.
I wanted to put a subject on the table that nobody in SEO has really examined until now. If you have a serious appetite for SEO work, we share a lot of good material on our Türk SEM Academy pages.
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The Idea of an Entity in SEO
Have you ever stopped to think about it? You run a search, and within a couple of seconds it hands you the right answer out of trillions of sites, and it knows what you are going to search for next. Sometimes it knows what you want better than you do. So how does Google run that process today? Through the trillions of relationships between billions of Google entities.
When you run a three word query, the relationships between entities are what get triggered. And we should add that it separates out the noun and verb roots, which works in almost every language.
Take an example. In Turkish, the query “tatil mekanı” (holiday spot) and “tatiller mekanı” are the same query, while “tatilci mekanı” (holidaymaker spot) is not. Because; “ler” is an inflectional suffix that makes a plural, while “ci” is a derivational one. Derivational suffixes attach to the root and carry it into a different meaning. Every word with a different meaning points to a different entity. Verbs, meanwhile, tend to describe the relationship.
Say that nouns describe entities and verbs describe relationships, and I would argue you are not far wrong. Google does not spell out clearly how its search engine works, of course. All we can do as SEO specialists is say these things as assumptions drawn from our own experience.
And What About Meaning?
Anxious? Sad? Or in love?
When you search for something, Google knows what you want out of that word or phrase. Beyond the first meaning of the words, it works from the total meaning of the phrase and tries to serve the best answer.
How do I get away from city life for a while?
Ask a question like that and it reads your need to travel, and serves you the most relevant pieces from within travel themed content. Generally, to work out what you want, it also notes the follow-up searches of users who typed the same query, and from that it has mapped the meaning between entities beautifully.
Semantic SEO is one of our most important subjects in the search for meaning. I would strongly recommend reading it.
Why is it so extremely hard to build a search engine better than Google? Because; we are talking about data built up over close to 30 years. Before Google called us SEO specialists, our line of work did not even have a name. I remember that mad year very well. Chrome, in the same way, is an important component in Google serving more accurate results.
I hope the US authorities do not split Chrome off from Google, and that Google carries on doing what it does well. One of the foundations of Google’s success is entities; the other is that it analyzes users’ next step, and the step after that.
You can take a look at the Google privacy policy.
Google and Chrome
Remembering the years is genuinely hard, but; I remember Google announcing Chrome right after it announced Analytics and Webmaster Tools. Google had even backed Firefox first before it developed its own browser. Once Google could reach detailed information about user experience, it made sweeping changes to its algorithm. Before that it was trying to produce the right answer purely from the links sites gave each other; with Chrome it began to understand exactly which content the user wanted, and we all got closer to accurate results.
Pulling Chrome out of the Google ecosystem now would make it harder for Google to see the quality of the sites that are doing the job properly. Google carries a very large mission for a better internet.
Take this example. If we hand the internet over to AI systems like ChatGPT, internet users will stop adding new content to their sites. That halts the production of new content, so information will no longer gain a presence on the internet. The truth is that the internet, and the existence of information itself, is under a serious threat. If a researcher adds a piece of content to their own site and an AI takes it and serves it to the user without them ever visiting the researcher’s site, that researcher will stop publishing their research. And that can go as far as stopping the production of new knowledge.
Pulling Chrome out of the Google ecosystem is a mistake, and failing to protect against this danger, which could stop the production of new knowledge, is a serious mistake too.
Our SEO agency follows these developments closely.
How the Internet Keeps Changing
Everything is changing fast, very fast. Back when we were arguing over PHP or ASP, the internet carried on developing under PHP’s clear lead. The years are hard to place, but when Facebook first appeared there were periods when our websites took serious losses. On the portals where people used to socialize, users started sharing what they had through Facebook instead.
I did not take the right steps back then, unfortunately. I read social platforms like Facebook, Instagram and YouTube as rivals, when in truth they were not. In the years when I was reaching millions of visitors a month, I was losing close to 50% of both engagement and visitors. I read it wrong that day, and I did not stand alongside the change. That is the basic reason it took me so very long to sign up to social media and start building a presence there.
Mehmet Göktaş, who joined us when we acquired Gelinlik.net, once told me a story of his own: “In the early days when Instagram was starting to get popular, a kid of about 19 with something like a hundred thousand followers in footwear came to me and said he wanted to sell shoes with me on a 50/50 partnership. I did not expect social media to grow the way it did back then, so I turned him down. He has built a serious brand now and he is turning over serious numbers.”
Social media changed how people behave on the internet; now AI is bringing another shift. I would like to move along with the good side of AI, but the way it lifts the content we produce and uses it straight off does make me stop and wonder about producing new content at all.
“According to the Pew Research Center’s reporting on internet use, social media use rises with every passing year. (Pew Research Center, 2023)”
