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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

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

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?

I just came across schema.org, which has a massive list of attribute tags that can be added to HTML code, presumable with the benefit of giving search engines clear signals about your content -- and by extension, presumably boosting the ranking of good-quality content sites. Many of the tags point back to schema.org for definitions of content types. Since it's the first time I've seen this, I thought I'd ask the question: Do the tags listed at schema.org carry any weight with Google, or is this a self-promotional effort by schema.org to become an arbiter of SEO and content encoding? Thanks folks.

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?