Understanding Semantic Search, Google, and Anchor text

[Dustybones]

SEO By The Sea offers some thoughts on how Google Crawls and what it looks for.

How Google Might Identify Synonyms for Entities Using Anchor Text

When Google indexes the Web, it?s often been convenient to think about the search engine running two different methods or approaches that seem to run in parallel. One of those involves the crawling and indexing and ranking of pages on the web (and images, videos, news, podcasts, and other documents).

The other approach doesn?t look at pages as much as it indexes objects it finds on the Web, or what we often refer to as named entities, which are specific people, places, or things ? real or fictional. We see this second kind of crawling often referred to as fact extraction and see the results of such extraction as Knowledge Panel results or even things like Google?s OneBox Question & Answer results.