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Thanks Peter.

We're still on the hunt here, too, without resolution. I'll post when we crack the nut.

We've also reached as deep into our Google contacts as possible, with no clarity.

Cheers.

Interesting. Are you suggesting that Google chooses who to include based on the volume of brand searches that it gets for each brand?

That doesn't necessarily match my expectation of who is already showing in the carousel, but I don't have solid data on it.

We continue to experiment with meta, markup, wiki, etc. No results yet. If anyone else has suggestions, I'd love to know. And I'll post outcomes here.

When you search for software-related terms, Google serves a carousel-style item above the organic listings. I've been assuming this is part of the Google Knowledge Graph. See http://imgur.com/a/TQpM5

The mystery lies in the selection of companies that are included in this carousel: the brands included are completely unrelated to the brands that rank well in the "normal" organic search listings. Giving that more color, here are the top 5 brands in "normal" organic search listings, for the query "invoice software," noting where they appear in the carousel:      BRAND    //  normal organic search position //   carousel position

• Wave                      //       1st    //       not present in carousel
• Quickbooks           //       2nd    //       1
• NCHSoftware        //       3rd    //       not present in carousel
• Invoicely                 //       4th    //       not present in carousel
• Freshbooks            //       5th    //       not present in carousel

Inversely, here are the top 5 in the carousel, noting where they appear in the "normal" organic search listings, again for the query "invoice software":

BRAND    //  carousel position //   normal organic search position

• Quickbooks             //       1st    //       2nd
• Zoho Office           //       2nd    //       9th
• Invoicera              //       3rd    //          15th
• Hiveage                //       4th    //          30th
• Apptivo                 //       5th    //       not present in first 10 pages of search results

Here's an annotated image of the same thing: http://imgur.com/a/0Pa6j
--I represent a brand (I'd rather not mention which) that ranks super well in the normal organic search listings, but doesn't rank accordingly in the knowledge graph carousel.

WHAT WE'VE TRIED

• implemented Schema markup

• updated Wikidata information

• updated Wikipedia information

We've reviewed the code on the pages that DO appear in the carousel, and haven't found any common threads.

Several weeks have passed since those initiatives. We've been re-indexed in that time, but are still not included in the search carousel.

I've seen people suggest resources like this
https://searchenginewatch.com/sew/how-to/2299454/4-google-carousel-optimization-tips
but those tips aren't addressing this problem. Also, things like claiming your business or other local business validation (which we've done) don't seem material to a non-local product search (but stranger things have happened, I know...).

A couple of SEOs have suggested AMP, but I've yet to see any authoritative info suggesting a link between AMP and desktop results.

Any help appreciated! I will report back on my findings.

This is a follow-up to a question I previously posted here: https://moz.com/community/q/kinds-of-organic-search-results-google

TQpM5 0Pa6j

Russ/Patrick: No go with Schema. I'll re-post a new question with more detail. Thanks.

Thanks Russ and Patrick. The rich snippet/schema markup sounds promising. I'll test that and report back. Cheers.

Not sure if this is a new "unit" for Google organic results. Please see the attached image.

When searching for "invoice software", the top quarter of the page is a ribbon of products/brands with badly formatted logos. The fact that it's so ugly, and there's nothing marking it as a paid result, leads me to think it's organic.

Anyone know what this SERP unit is called; and better still: How do you get included? We rank super high in the normal organic results, but don't appear at all in this product ribbon.

y71A9

Thanks Miriam. A clarifying question: On your own page, would you mark up a testimonial with schema.org "review" and/or "rating" metadata, or  in your opinion is this also a mistake? (i.e., do you take the stance that Google distinguishes between testimonials and reviews, and that you could be penalized for using the markup?)

Thanks.

Logs don't show any impact from bot traffic.

Here's some more detail:

1. Google Analytics shows that the volume of traffic from search is flat.

2. When people sign up for our product (SaaS tools for small businesses), our system captures referral information. The cookies, naturally, indicate when the user came from organic search. Sometimes the cookie shows no referral information, in which case we infer the user is either a direct visitor, or they've blocked cookies.

3. Starting August 24/25, the traffic we can determine as being "direct" spiked, and the traffic from "organic search" dropped by basically the same amount.

My belief is that the traffic, and the traffic composition, haven't changed. What's changed is the info that we are able to see in the cookie. i.e., if organic search traffic isn't being cookied, it will look to us like "direct."

What I wanted to rule out was: Has anyone else seen this in their own metrics lately? It looks like the answer is no, so I will deduce that it's not industry-wide, and that something is happening within our systems.

So the next question, with less reason to hope MOZzers will have an answer: Any guesses how this kind of problem happens?

If "organic search" traffic had fallen to 0, it would be clear that something somewhere broke completely. But since it only dipped, I'm trying to figure out how some of the data is being lost, while some of it gets through.

Thanks folks.

Interesting theory. I wouldn't think so, since it was a sharp decrease in organic search paired with a sharp increase on the very same day of "unreferred" traffic. But I'll check...

Hi folks.

We've seen a precipitous change in the referral data that we're able to gather from cookies. Specifically:

On August 24 or 25, traffic to our site that was cookied as coming from organic search dropped by ~25%, and traffic coming in with no referrer data at all (i.e., it appears to be "direct") rose by roughly the same amount.

As far as we can see, we haven't changed anything in our systems that would have caused this (we're not just mis-reading the cookie info), so I'm looking for external reasons.

Has anyone else seen this? Or have any ideas why it would happen?

Final verdict:

I took the plunge. Even though our product is geography agnostic, I changed our Webmaster Tools setting to "U.S."

Sure enough, we immediately saw some improvements in the google.COM rankings. Not much of an impact on .CA, and any loss here was definitely made up in the new .COM traffic.

I'll be doing a deeper dive into the data later.

Thanks everyone.

Though my company is based in Canada, we have a .com URL, we're hosted on servers in the U.S., and most of our customers are in the U.S. Our marketing efforts are focused on the U.S. Heck, we even drop the "u" in "colour" and "favour"!

Nonetheless we rank very well in Google.ca, and rather poorly on Google.com.

One hypothesis is that we have more backlinks from .ca domains than .com, but I don't believe that to be true. For sure, the highest quality links we have come from .coms like NYTimes.com.

Any suggestions on how we can improve the .com rankings, other than keeping on with the link building?

Thanks for the answer. A couple of questions come to mind:

Won't setting our Google Webmaster Tools to United States hurt our performance in other parts of the world? So far I've made a point of ensuring that Webmaster Tools has us as not geo-specific ("Target users in: unlisted", on the Site Configuration > Settings screen of Webmaster Tools).

Also (on the advice of another SEO advisor) we verified our Google Places location, so is there a risk of sending mixed signals to Google and getting hurt by that?

Not sure if this is a new "unit" for Google organic results. Please see the attached image.

When searching for "invoice software", the top quarter of the page is a ribbon of products/brands with badly formatted logos. The fact that it's so ugly, and there's nothing marking it as a paid result, leads me to think it's organic.

Anyone know what this SERP unit is called; and better still: How do you get included? We rank super high in the normal organic results, but don't appear at all in this product ribbon.

y71A9