Unlinked Brand Mentions: A Hidden Factor in Google Rankings?
Posted: Tue Apr 29, 2025 4:35 am
⏲ Reading time: 16 minutes
Google has come a long way since the days of simple keyword and link ranking. Today, the search engine relies heavily on entities —clearly armenia phone number data identified people, places, brands, and concepts—to understand the meaning of web pages and user queries. Entity citations (brand mentions without hyperlinks) are generating a lot of interest: can they influence a site's ranking on Google?
So, are these unrelated brand mentions simply lost words on the web or powerful signals for Google? To answer this, you need to understand the engine behind Google's intelligence: the Knowledge Graph. How does it feed? How does it assess the reputation of an entity (like your company)? And most importantly, how much weight does it give to a non-clickable citation? I'll try to uncover the theory, the data, and the potential impact on your ranking.
This post directly echoes one of my posts on Linkedin about my vision of SEO:
Google's Knowledge Graph: Entities and Relationships
A bit of history: Google's Knowledge Graph is a vast database that organizes information about real-world entities (people, organizations, places, objects, concepts) and the relationships between them. Launched in 2012, it draws its information from reliable sources like Freebase (an open database acquired by Google), Wikipedia , the CIA World Factbook, and other structured databases. This data allows Google to have verified facts about entities (dates, descriptions, attributes) and to establish semantic connections between them.
For example, instead of simply matching keywords, Google might understand that a query like "capital of country with Eiffel Tower" is targeting the entity "Paris, France," even if neither "Paris" nor "France" are explicitly mentioned in the query. This shift from processing text strings to understanding " things , not strings" marked Google's shift toward entity-based semantic search .
Why is this important?
Being present in the Knowledge Graph is a major asset for a website or brand. If your brand, product, organization, or person is already clearly defined in Google's Knowledge Base, you have a head start over a competitor who isn't listed there. This is because Google knows your entity and can more easily enrich the information about it, for example, by displaying a Knowledge Panel (information box) when people search for your name.
Google has come a long way since the days of simple keyword and link ranking. Today, the search engine relies heavily on entities —clearly armenia phone number data identified people, places, brands, and concepts—to understand the meaning of web pages and user queries. Entity citations (brand mentions without hyperlinks) are generating a lot of interest: can they influence a site's ranking on Google?
So, are these unrelated brand mentions simply lost words on the web or powerful signals for Google? To answer this, you need to understand the engine behind Google's intelligence: the Knowledge Graph. How does it feed? How does it assess the reputation of an entity (like your company)? And most importantly, how much weight does it give to a non-clickable citation? I'll try to uncover the theory, the data, and the potential impact on your ranking.
This post directly echoes one of my posts on Linkedin about my vision of SEO:
Google's Knowledge Graph: Entities and Relationships
A bit of history: Google's Knowledge Graph is a vast database that organizes information about real-world entities (people, organizations, places, objects, concepts) and the relationships between them. Launched in 2012, it draws its information from reliable sources like Freebase (an open database acquired by Google), Wikipedia , the CIA World Factbook, and other structured databases. This data allows Google to have verified facts about entities (dates, descriptions, attributes) and to establish semantic connections between them.
For example, instead of simply matching keywords, Google might understand that a query like "capital of country with Eiffel Tower" is targeting the entity "Paris, France," even if neither "Paris" nor "France" are explicitly mentioned in the query. This shift from processing text strings to understanding " things , not strings" marked Google's shift toward entity-based semantic search .
Why is this important?
Being present in the Knowledge Graph is a major asset for a website or brand. If your brand, product, organization, or person is already clearly defined in Google's Knowledge Base, you have a head start over a competitor who isn't listed there. This is because Google knows your entity and can more easily enrich the information about it, for example, by displaying a Knowledge Panel (information box) when people search for your name.