The Semantic Web blog recently caught up with Chris Lewis, who’s been writing our guest series (starting here) on search engine optimization and semantic relevance, to discuss with him the impact of Google’s acquisition of Metaweb, including its potential impact around SEO. (Lewis is the founder of Search Engine Semantics, a site which offers consulting services, information guides and online resources for the correct implementation of Semantics for SEO.)

To set the context for the discussion, Lewis notes first that, since both Metaweb and Freebase content are available via an open API, a big question is why did Google buy the company? “There’s speculation that they will use the data as part of a competitive service against Facebook (Google Me). Or to compete against new services that Bing has been launching,” he says.

Lewis believes — from studying Google’s existing data classification systems via semantic analysis — that the most likely reason that Google made this acquisition is about ENTITIES [caps are his]. “We think that Google is playing a VERY BIG GAME here. Metabase organizes information around entities (people, places, things) and has developed a unique classification system currently numbering 12 million entities,” Lewis says. “Metabase allows web site owners to insert ‘Topic Blocks’ onto their web site free of charge for any keyword variable. Depending on the amount of content that they have aggregated, this may include news, blogs, wikis, Twitter content streams, links to social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, images, movie trailers and more. As people interact on web sites with these Topic Blocks, all of the new data is added to the main Metaweb database.”

Our Q&A follows:

Q1: In its announcement of the Metaweb acquisition Google wrote on its blog “We believe that by improving Freebase, it will be a tremendous resource to make the web richer for everyone. And to the extent the web becomes a better place, this is good for webmasters and good for users.” Tell us how you think this is good for webmasters.
A1: The reason that Google thinks this will be good for webmasters is that Google will likely encourage adoption of Topic Blocks on web sites and blogs (based on free rich content, plus will help your SEO relevancy ranking). It will also create a technology framework for the Semantic Web without webmasters having to learn a host of new technologies (see answer to Q3 below).

Q2: And tell us if you see any downsides, upsets or otherwise ahead.
A2: This will significantly affect search results over time. Google is doing this to improve the quality of complex extended queries (e.g. ‘actresses in New York city under 25 years old who have won an Emmy nomination’). Complex queries like this are presently very difficult for Google to answer due to the number of keywords involved.

This has traditionally been called ‘the long tail’ in search, and has been the focus of SEO activity, since obvious short tail queries like ‘cheap flights’ are extremely difficult to rank for. In the future, SEO’s will be forced to optimize much more for very specific vertical content around very complex queries; in other words we will probably see a much deeper fragmentation of the long tail into ‘the extended long tail’ or some such description. But if multiple web sites are going to offer the same content from Metaweb, original content posting will still be king as a content differentiator.

Also, first-class ‘site theming’ is going to become much more relevant since the very best themes will become the Authority Sites for given subjects and entities.

We expect that the web will evolve much like High Street Retail, or any market as it matures. You’ll have the Big Box retailers (aka Authority Sites) which dominate their markets, then specialized retailer chains for specifics, then local convenience retailing, etc. In other words, a few years from now there will be a limited number of ‘Authority Sites’ and because it will be extremely expensive and difficult to compete as a new entrant, these sites will have a very high dollar value as acquisitions. Once people really get an understanding of this, expect to see multiple acquisition activity of web sites as brands posture to dominate a space.

Q3. So practically speaking, what if anything should webmasters start doing differently?

A3: This is going to be a sea change for SEO’s and webmasters. Sites that have previously focused on ‘keyword density’ are already losing traffic share and rankings. SEO’s and webmasters are only just starting to come to terms in understanding semantic data, much of the problem being that a lot of the info out there remains on a technical level, with few easy-to-use commercial applications solutions.

We think this is central to the Google acquisition. Google realizes that to get web sites to adopt new coding formats like CommonTag will take years, and why would they bother without immediate benefits? But if Google can play the new game of a plug-and-play content solution (e.g. Metaweb has a plugin for WordPress), it’s likely that every CMS platform and site building software tool will be forced to come to the party.

Q4. Is this acquisition the market push needed to drive the Semantic Web ahead, that there’s ROI now?

A4: We think that Google is using this to create momentum for the Semantic Web, but without forcing webmasters to adopt many of the (confusing) technologies that are currently promoted to deliver Semantic Web.

Overall, Google seems to be adopting this approach to maintain its dominance in search and to beat off the growing threat from Bing, especially for complex queries which are taking an increasing share of search, and which pay much higher advertising rates due to their highly targeted nature. Google can use its power in search engine traffic to ‘encourage’ web sites to adopt MetaWeb and Freebase. We can also expect to see some kind of new product come out of Google in the next 6-9 months around this solution.

In summary, webmasters and SEO’s will get entirely left behind if they do not jump on the new Entities Wagon Train. This seems to be a very smart move by Google to push toward a Semantic Web with much greater data and query intelligence, but without the headaches for webmasters.

The reason that they bought the company rather than licensing via the open API is that they want to own access to the ever-changing data, and will integrate the Entities structure into their data classification system to power search results. This might become Google’s first real move into ontologies now that they have a structure to work with which is accurate, flexible, and will learn and grow over time.

If they deliver on this, they will own search.

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