Things, not strings. If you haven’t heard this before, it comes from a famous Google blog post that announced the Knowledge Graph.
The announcement’s 11th anniversary is only a month away, yet many still struggle to understand what “things, not strings” really means for SEO.
The quote is an attempt to convey that Google understands things and is no longer a simple keyword detection algorithm.
In May 2012, one could argue that entity SEO was born. Google’s machine learning, aided by semi-structured and structured knowledge bases, could understand the meaning behind a keyword.
