Not only does Graph Search not currently have all the functionality that Facebook has planned for it, but it’s also still in the process of slowly rolling out. And I do mean slowly. Any notions you have about Graph Search thus far are simply incomplete. What’s available now is nothing compared to what will be available.

Even still, some have big hope for Facebook’s revamped search and its potential effects on small businesses. Consider this infographic from Advantage Capital Funds:

Infographic by Advantage Capital Funds

That’s all fine and good, but online marketers need data. When it comes to search marketing, keyword data is obviously of the utmost importance (though it’s getting harder to come by thanks to the whole “not provided” ordeal), but this isn’t something that’s readily available from Facebook. You can’t just look at your search data in Google Analytics and see the Graph Search referrals, because Graph Search is part of Facebook, which Google considers social rather than search, even though Graph Search sends users to Bing results in cases where Facebook’s own data doesn’t match the query.

It’s entirely possible that the situation will get better for webmasters and marketers in the future, but for now, there is a workaround, which Glenn Gabe discusses in a blog post (via Search Engine Land).

Facebook does have keyword data available via referral strings. As Gabe noticed, the keyword is being passed along int he referrer. He shows this example:

“As you can guess, I jumped into Google Analytics to see how this was being picked up,” Gabe writes. “Since Facebook isn’t an official search engine in GA, it was still showing up as a referring site (without the keyword showing up). But, since the q= querystring parameter was being passed in the referrer, I knew I could surface those keywords via advanced filters. So, I quickly set up a new profile and added a filter that would capture graph searches from Facebook. And it works.”

Gabe goes on to provide step-by-step instructions for doing this, so check out the post if this is something you want to do.

Tracking this data is bound to make Graph Search a lot more helpful to your business. And wait until the product really gets into full swing.

First up, Twitter has added new manual features for negative keyword targeting that allows advertisers to keep their Promoted Tweets out of certain search results. For example, Dick’s Sporting Goods may want to stay out of searches involving Dick Cheney. To do this, they could add “Cheney” to the negative keyword list.

They’ve also added a bulk import tool so advertisers can import keywords lists from other ad programs they’re involved in. Or, they can just cut-and-paste the list into the tool as well.

When entering positive keywords, advertisers can now choose between three different options for how (specifically) they want the Promoted Tweets to be activated – exact match, phrase match, and basic keyword match.

On the automatic help side, Twitter is also announcing trend matching for advertiser’s campaigns. Here’s how Twitter explains it:

“[E]ven more exciting to us is the new option to automatically match your Promoted Tweets in search to relevant and related trending topics. Trends can rise and fall quickly with world events, TV shows and sporting matches, or memes like #OneOfMyFavoriteMovies. If you use this new matching option (which is enabled by default for new campaigns), we use relevance signals about your Promoted Tweets and the Trend itself to help increase your campaign’s coverage automatically. For example, if a celebrity’s pregnancy news starts trending, and you’re a retailer of baby clothing, your Promoted Tweet may be entered into the auction for that trending search.”

Twitter says that all of these new ad options should be ready to use starting today.

This week, Google released a big list of 65 changes it made throughout August and September. Two of them were listed under the project “Synonyms” label.

Regarding one of them, Google said, “This change made improvements to rely on fewer ‘low-confidence’ synonyms when the user’s original query has good results.”

Of the second one, Google said, “This change improved the use of synonyms for search terms to more often return results that are relevant to the user’s intention.”

When Google last released a big list of changes, comprised of June’s and July’s changes, there were four other synonym-specific changes listed. More on those here.

We recently had an interesting discussion with former Googler Vanessa Fox about Google’s treatment of synonyms. She told us, “Google was already much better than a lot of people realized at synonyms when I worked there. But things have definitely improved considerably.”

“Since Google is always looking to better understand what the searcher is looking for and what pages on the web most satisfy that search, you can imagine that they spend a lot of time in this area — not just synonyms but overall query intent and page meaning,” she added.

You can read our whole conversation here.

As a webmaster or site owner, have you noticed an impact from this update? Have you noticed a dramatic change in search results as a user? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Just to clear up any confusion from the start, Cutts also said the EMD update is unrelated to the Panda and Penguin updates. Here are his exact tweets:

Follow @mattcutts

Matt Cutts
@mattcutts

Minor weather report: small upcoming Google algo change will reduce low-quality “exact-match” domains in search results.

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2 days ago via web · powered by @socialditto

Follow @mattcutts

Matt Cutts
@mattcutts

New exact-match domain (EMD) algo affects 0.6% of English-US queries to a noticeable degree. Unrelated to Panda/Penguin.

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2 days ago via web · powered by @socialditto

While 0.6% of English-US queries may not sound like an incredible amount of results impacted, there are already tons of people claiming to have been hit by the update. Here is a small sampling of the comments we’ve received from readers:

90% of my sites got hit. Yes they had part of a keyword in the domain name but other than one site, I wouldn’t consider the rest of them low-quality sites. Each one had high quality unique content, numerous pages.

Okay, at least I know what happened. Two of my websites are gone. Good sites, with unique content and a lot of backlinks and work behind.

Some readers appear to welcome the update. Here are a few of the more positive comments we’ve received:

I’ve been waiting for an update like this for a long time. I’ve speculated that something like this has been in the works because a brand is almost always going to be more valuable than a spammy exact match domain.

…

Good Authoritative content is all that has ever mattered & has been the Google mantra from the start, The EMD with “Good Authoritative” root domain content will always have the edge…

…

I was waiting for this update it may brings my blogs up in the google search. I have blogs which don’t have keywords in urls. This updates helps a lot.

Here’s some additional reaction from Twitter:

Follow @AlanaBurton

Alana Burton
@AlanaBurton

There’s nothing tells the visitor exactly what a website should be about more than an EMD

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4 minutes ago via web · powered by @socialditto

Follow @kmullett

Kevin Mullett
@kmullett

Wining about losing your EMD (exact match domain) leverage? You took advantage of a Google ranking signal, open for change. #fin

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4 minutes ago via TweetDeck · powered by @socialditto

Follow @SEOjunkie

Lee Jackson
@SEOjunkie

Does the new Google algo update mean the end of low quality Exact Match Domains? http://t.co/ILFKcwgK Good move!

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50 minutes ago via Buffer · powered by @socialditto

Follow @rjonesx

rjonesx
@rjonesx

Anyone looked into local exact match domains? It appears they may have dodged the EMD genocide.

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37 minutes ago via Osfoora for iPhone · powered by @socialditto

Follow @danbellj

Dan Bell
@danbellj

So from the few checks that I have done so far, our EMD’s seem to be winning and actually moved up a few positions

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1 hour ago via TweetDeck · powered by @socialditto

Dr. Peter J. Meyers at SEOmoz put together some research on the update using MozCast “Top-View” metrics, indicating that despite Cutts’ wording of “upcoming,” the change appears to had already begun:

“We measured a 24-hour drop in EMD influence from 3.58% to 3.21%,” writes Meyers. “This represents a day-over-day change of 10.3%. While the graph only shows the 30-day view, this also marks the lowest measurement of EMD influence on record since we started collecting data in early April.”

The following sites are some examples of those who got hit, according to Meyers (though he acknowledges he can’t prove they were definitely because of this specific update – it does seem highly likely): bmicalculatormale.com, charterschools.org, playscrabble.net, purses.org, and teethwhitening.com. None of these had actually ranked number one for their respective keywords, according to Meyers, but they went from postions like 3, 4 and 7, to dropping significantly.

It will be interesting to see if more domain-related changes are announced. This is the second one Cutts has tweeted about in recent weeks. He recently talked about a domain diversity update.

When Google releases its monthly (sometimes) lists of algorithm changes, there is often a visible theme from month to month. In June, for example, there were quite a few updates related to how Google handles natural language. I wonder if we might see more domain-related tweaks when Google finally releases the September (and August) lists. Perhaps there will be more heading into October.

What do you think of the EMD update? Good move on Google’s part? Let us know in the comments.

“On the Bing Ads Opportunities page, we now provide you with exact match keyword suggestions that we think are relevant to your campaigns and will help your ads serve more often,” says Microsoft’s Manu Aery. “The suggestions are based on the keywords and ads you’re already using in each ad group.”

Bing provides an estimate of how many monthly searches you could reach by using the recommended keyword, a suggested first page bid, a recommended ad group and campaign, an “easy” accept option to apply the suggested keyword, and an option to add unique destination URLs and parameters.

To access the feature, go to the Opportunities tab, and then the Keyword Suggestions tab.

Microsoft notes that API users will call the GetKeywordOpportunities API to get the list of keyword suggestions that are relevant to the specified ad group.

Have you seen Google’s use of synonyms impact search results in a negative way? As a content provider, has it made things easier? Let us know in the comments.

Last month, after a great deal of waiting, Google released its big lists of algorithm changes for the months of June and July. In June, it was revealed that Google had made a number of changes to how it handles synonyms. As we noted at the time, the better Google gets at understanding the way users search (in terms of the language they use), the more it is getting away from dependence on keywords for delivering relevant results. Combine that with Google’s increased delivery of its own quick answers-style results and increased number of search results pages that show less than ten classic, organic results, and it’s going to have an affect on how sites can get in front of users, for better or for worse.

Former Googler Vanessa Fox, who built Webmaster Central (and now runs Nine By Blue), tells WebProNews, “Google was already much better than a lot of people realized at synonyms when I worked there. But things have definitely improved considerably”

“Since Google is always looking to better understand what the searcher is looking for and what pages on the web most satisfy that search, you can imagine that they spend a lot of time in this area — not just synonyms but overall query intent and page meaning,” she says.

Fox tells us that Google’s decreased dependence on keywords makes things easier on content providers.

“Write content based on how it best helps your audience, not based on getting in all the variations of keyword phrases for search engines,” she says. “Keyword-stuffed titles, headings, and text can be less engaging for users. They may skip the listing in search results and may bounce off the page if they click through. By focusing on solving a searcher’s problem, you better connect with your audience and ensure that all the work you did to enable your site to rank well pays off.”

“This isn’t a new change for SEO,” she says, noting that it’s the core focus of her book , “and even was for the first edition published in 2010.”

“It’s still important to do keyword research to understand what your audience is looking for, and I still think it’s important to use the most important keyword phrase in the left side of your title tag so it stands out for searchers scanning the listings,” Fox says. “But don’t create separate pages for each keyword phrase or use the list of phrases to pepper the page. Just cluster the similar queries and map one page to the cluster and then write the content based on what you think users most need.”

Fox recently wrote a piece for Search Engine Land called, “Is Google’s Synonym Matching Increasing? How Searchers & Brands Can Be Both Helped & Hurt By Evolving Understanding Of Intent,” analyzing just how Google’s treatment of synonyms can affect brands and users.

In Fox’s article, she shared an interesting example of how Google’s synonym matching can go “awry,” and end up showing more results from a competitor than a brand that the user actually typed into the search box.

“Presumably, lots of people were searching for h. h. gregg in conjunction with things like laptops, TVs, and printers,” explained Fox in the article. “But lots more people were searching for laptops, TV, and printers in conjunction with Best Buy. So when people searched for [hhgregg site], Google ranked hhregg.com first, but ranked bestbuy.com second.”

She pointed out that Google was also showing content from bestbuy.com for five other results on the page. If this was one of Google’s seven-result pages, that would account for every organic result apart from the top one.

Google appears to have corrected the h.h. Gregg/Best Buy results, but one has to wonder how many similar examples are out there in the wild.

“I see it every so often, but it’s actually pretty rare,” Fox tells us. “Typically, a branded intent is seen very differently from a topical/task intent. But you can see by the steps I outlined in the article how this can happen and seem perfectly legitimate until searcher click behavior shows signs that the result isn’t showing what the user really wanted.”

Fox suggests in her article that if a brand experiences something like h.h. Gregg, they write a post about it in Google’s discussion forum.

She tells us, “I’m not sure if they would take manual action or would adjust the algorithm. But while at Google, I created a position called ‘webmaster trends analyst’ specifically to watch for these types of issues in the forums. Search engineers take this information as they do data from searcher behavior to pinpoint what needs to be adjusted.”

It can’t hurt, either way.

What do you make of Google’s decreased dependence on keywords? Is the search engine doing a good job of returning relevant results? Share your thoughts.

In addition to those ten changes, there were also five list entries dealing specifically with synonyms, which one might say are also related to natural language. All five of those were also made in June. The listings are as follows:

The synonym-related changes indicate that Google is getting better at understanding what we mean, and what we’re looking for.

The better Google gets at understanding the way users search in terms of the language they use, the more Google is getting away from its dependence on keywords for delivering relevant results, which appears to be one of Google’s main goals as a search engine.

In fact, that’s exactly what the Knowledge Graph is all about. “Things, not strings,” as Google likes to put it.

By the way, Google announced last week that it was expanding the Knowledge Graph globally (in English), and adding more to the Knowledge Graph interface on the SERPs.

The full document containing the keywords is called the “Analyst’s Desktop Binder.” The document comes from 2011 so we can consider it to be pretty recent. The people who use the document as a guideline are those working at the Department of Homeland Security’s National Operation Center. Those working at the center look for words to spot signs of danger so they can stop attacks before they happen, or so that’s what they say.

The Daily Mail reports that the document was forced into the open after people questioned the true reason behind the monitoring. There are those who believe that the U.S. government is only monitoring online activities and keywords to find those that criticize the government online and spread dissent. The government obviously denies those claims and sticks to its claims that they’re only trying to protect its citizens.

The words that the government actively looks for are split into a number of categories. The categories range from the usual suspects like “Domestic Security” and “HAZMAT & Nuclear” to things like “Southwest Border Violence” and “Weather/Disaster/Emergency.” All of these categories contain some bizarre words that you wouldn’t even think about when it comes to these categories like “pork” in the “Health Concern + H1N1″ category. Sure, H1N1 is swine flu, but pork is a common enough word that it’s used outside of talking about a specific illness.

The most interesting category of all, however, is “Cyber Security.” Oddly enough, Anonymous is not listed in the group of keywords although I assume the term will be there in the updated keyword list for this year. Some of the terms in the category include “China,” “2600,” and “DDOS.”

According to the DHS, they don’t just look at these words and go into high alert every time a person talks about cooking up some pork on Facebook. Speaking to The Daily Mail, a spokesperson said that they review the context before they start firing signal flares.

That’s a relief, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve used the word “Anthrax” to refer to the legendary metal band. Hopefully the DHS doesn’t employ people who think listening to metal is tantamount to social disorder.

Check out the full list of words below. I’ve set up the document to skip to the list of words immediately, but it’s worth checking out the full report to see how the DHS monitors what you say on social media.

Analyst Desktop Binder_REDACTED

Today, Google announced the Knowledge Graph, which Google is saying makes it smarter at determining what people mean when they’re searching for things. More on the Knowledge Graph here. It also comes in mobile.

Google is indicating that this is a step away from keywords. In the official announcement, SVP, Engineering, Amit Singhal, says:

Take a query like [taj mahal]. For more than four decades, search has essentially been about matching keywords to queries. To a search engine the words [taj mahal] have been just that—two words.

But we all know that [taj mahal] has a much richer meaning. You might think of one of the world’s most beautiful monuments, or a Grammy Award-winning musician, or possibly even a casino in Atlantic City, NJ. Or, depending on when you last ate, the nearest Indian restaurant. It’s why we’ve been working on an intelligent model—in geek-speak, a “graph”—that understands real-world entities and their relationships to one another: things, not strings.

Google’s head of webspam, Matt Cutts, tweeted about the feature:

On Google+, Cutts said, “Google just announced its Knowledge Graph. It’s another step away from raw keywords (without knowing what those words really mean) toward understanding things in the real-world and how they relate to each other. The knowledge graph improves our ability to understand the intent of a query so we can give better answers and search results.”

Keywords have, of course, been a major point of spam, which Google is working hard to eliminate (see Penguin update). The less Google can rely on keywords to deliver relevant results, the less susceptible to spam it should be.

I don’t think the Knowledge Graph has done anything to diminish the value of using relevant keywords in your content, and it doesn’t seem to affect the regular, organic web results, but who knows if this will change somewhere down the line.

It is interesting to see Google continue to clutter up its search results pages, given that its clean design was one of the big differentiators of the search engine in its early days.

While Google does provide us with all these changes it makes (not ALL of the changes it makes, surely – it makes over 500 a year), Google also tends to send mixed signals, telling users not to focus on the SEO trends. Trends must start when signals are discovered, so it seems odd for Google to release these lists, but the company has indicated it is an effort to be more transparent, without giving away the secret sauce in its entirety.

But if you look at a signal like this one, they’re clearly not giving much away, even though they’re telling you changes have been made with regards to this particular signal:

Improvements to how search terms are scored in ranking. [launch codename "Bi02sw41"] One of the most fundamental signals used in search is whether and how your search terms appear on the pages you’re searching. This change improves the way those terms are scored.

So, from this, we know that Google has changed how it scores key phrases. They don’t say whether they have a greater or smaller impact on how content ranks, though I’d be inclined to speculate that it’s smaller.

Google is always talking about how it is getting better at understanding content, so it seems unlikely that the algorithm would have to rely on search terms more for ranking. As Google says, this is one of the most fundamental signals used in search. It’s always been an obvious signal. It seems like it would be a step backwards if search terms appearing on a page had a greater impact. That would go against that whole SEO mattering less message Google has been sending lately (particularly with the Penguin update). It doesn’t get anymore SEO than keywords.

In the last paragraph of Google’s announcement of the Penguin update, Matt Cutts wrote, “We want people doing white hat search engine optimization (or even no search engine optimization at all) to be free to focus on creating amazing, compelling web sites.” Emphasis added.

For that matter, keyword stuffing, a classic black hat SEO technique was one of the focal points of the Penguin update. This would effectively render keywords less significant in that regard. On that note, there’s another change on the new list related to keyword stuffing:

Keyword stuffing classifier improvement. [project codename "Spam"] We have classifiers designed to detect when a website is keyword stuffing. This change made the keyword stuffing classifier better.

There’s another entry on Google’s new list of changes, which would also seem to support the theory of a lessened weight on keywords:

Improvements to local navigational searches. [launch codename "onebar-l"] For searches that include location terms, e.g. [dunston mint seattle] or [Vaso Azzurro Restaurant 94043], we are more likely to rank the local navigational homepages in the top position, even in cases where the navigational page does not mention the location. Emphasis added.

Google is saying outright that it’s going to return results that don’t have the exact search terms the user used. Plus, the Bi02sw41 entry appears directly after that on the list.

There’s another entry, which could be related. It’s certainly noteworthy either way:

Better query interpretation. This launch helps us better interpret the likely intention of your search query as suggested by your last few searches.

This is the type of thing that could very well cause Google to rely less on exact key phrases.

I wouldn’t advise that you stop using keywords in your content, and I’ve yet to see any real evidence that Google isn’t relying on my exact queries to return results. Keywords obviously still matter a great deal – just maybe not quite to the extent that they used to.

Even Google itself, in a recent list of SEO DOs and DON’Ts said: “Include relevant words in your copy: Try to put yourself in the shoes of searchers. What would they query to find you? Your name/business name, location, products, etc., are important. It’s also helpful to use the same terms in your site that your users might type (e.g., you might be a trained “flower designer” but most searchers might type [florist]), and to answer the questions they might have (e.g., store hours, product specs, reviews). It helps to know your customers.”

So, again, I’m not in any way saying keywords don’t matter. They do. Honestly, I’m not really sure what you’re supposed to do with the information in this article, but if Google is giving any less weight to keywords, it’s worth knowing about.