In our continuing effort to provide the most accurate picture of the SERPs, we’re making some minor updates to the way we parse Google universal results. This may affect a small percentage of your keyword rankings.
First up: redefining “Places”
It’s official! Google’s old seven-pack places result has completely disappeared from the SERPs and has been replaced by Google’s new three-pack places result — also known in the industry as the “snack pack” and labeled in STAT as PlacesV3. Because of this, you’ll no longer see new instances of the Places result type in STAT.
In addition, we’ve taken a closer look at the one-pack places result and decided that it makes more sense to report that as an organic result. In other words, it’s no longer treated as a Places universal result in STAT.
This means any future instance of a one-pack result will be categorized as organic and therefore included in the base rank calculations. You should see a shift by one position in the base ranks for affected keywords. We think this is a more accurate representation of your rank on the SERP.
This “one-pack” type of result will now be treated as an organic result.
Introducing the “Knowledge Graph” result type
Google has had “Knowledge Graph” results for quite a while, but that term was not previously used in STAT.
Up until now, STAT has variously categorized these universal results as Answers, Flights, and others, depending on the type of content in the result. After some research, we decided to re-categorize some of them within the new Knowledge Graph results type in STAT.
- Knowledge Graph includes complex informational results that have several components, and are generally characterized by multiple pieces of highly structured data or multiple images.
- Answers is for simpler informational snippets that may or may not also include a site link or an image. These results usually feature unstructured or minimally structured data.
- Flights is strictly for paid results that give the user the option of booking.
Because these are all universal result types, the re-categorizations will not affect your Google base ranking.
Need an example? Some travel-related queries (like the one shown below) were previously labeled as Flights in STAT. However, because the box is strictly informational with no option to book and no links to booking sites, this kind of result will now be labeled as a Knowledge Graph result.
This informational result will now be labeled Knowledge Graph instead of Flights.
Another example: if you search for [Egypt] on your smartphone, you’ll get an information box with details, maps, and destinations in Egypt at the top of the SERP. Previously this was categorized as an Answers box, but STAT will now report this complex panel as a Knowledge Graph result.
Hopefully this explains all of the changes that you might notice on your end. If you have any questions at all, don’t hesitate to reach out at support@getSTAT.com.
Cheers,
The STAT Team