What is a knowledge graph and how does one work?

Asking your favorite voice assistant what the weather will be like tomorrow?

Thats thanks to a knowledge graph.

But what exactly is a knowledge graph?

The easiest example is probably the box you see in Googles results.

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Well, one of the best examples is its effect on SEO.

Try asking Google Who are the founders of The Next Web?

This information is encoded, among billions of other entities, in a data structure called triples made ofsubjectpredicateobjectstatements.

This allows the query parser to understand what the user is asking and to fetch the right answer.

This has a clear impact on the traditional organic opportunities that are slowly shrinking.

Rand Fishkin has collected and shareda good datasetif you want to dig deeper on the topic.

And how can I influence the data in the Google Knowledge Graph?

But why do you want this?

SEO has always been about helping machines understand and index the content on our website.

The idea of building a knowledge graph in a way is similar.

Take speed, for example.

If our pages dont render in less than two seconds were less likely to appear on voice search.

But how do we define or categorize a specific output?

So what is it?

Language provides a way to pull up the graph using concepts that are interlinked with public knowledge bases.

Knowledge graphs also allow us to create structures to properly categorize and tag the content that we produce.

We can tell a graph that an article has as its main topic blockchain but also talks about Ethereum.

For example, the scatter plot below of eCPM vs Pageviews we got from our analytics.

The aim is to show correlation between two or more variables.

So the size of the circles is the revenue generated per each entity.

Here the knowledge graph comes into play by querying it and looking for related topics or content cluster.

I hope this article was an inspiration for you to try taking advantage of knowledge graphs at your company.

Julian is Front-end Developer at TNW.

you might find me on x.com, mastodon.nl, and hachyderm.io.

(show all)Julianis Front-end Developer at TNW.

it’s possible for you to find me onx.com,mastodon.nl, andhachyderm.io.