Getting into Google's knowledge graph

05 Oct 2015

My post from past Supported language highlighters in Pygments for Jekyll and GitHub Pages got indexed in knowledge graph and now appears as first result if you search for “pygments languages” which made my day. Thank you Google:)

Google’s knowledge graph is data collected from various semantic sources and stored by Google to display comprehensive and meaningful search results to a user. We see knowledge graph based results when searching on Google for “best movies of 2015”

and “Nikola Tesla”.

Answers to popular questions from Stackoverflow also frequently appear in search results. Similarly queries such as “List of (something popular here)” result in a list generated by Google by reading a <table> from crawled page. You can see such tables by searching on Google Tables.

One lesson I learned from appearance of my list as first result is that no exclusive SEO is needed if you write original content in simple HTML markup. Google does and will recognize your content and will rank it on top. Dirty seo and over optimization for search engines lead to disaster. My post about keeping users and original content as focus in seo discusses some issues in industry in detail.