I have been optimizing sites for search engines since 1998, the year Google was incorporated. In those 25 years, I never saw an update as big as the 2023 E-E-A-T Knowledge Graph update.
My team took a vote and chose a cheeky nickname for the update: Killer Whale (massive and making a big splash).
The Killer Whale update started in July 2023 as a considerable E-E-A-T update to the Knowledge Graph.
The unique feature of this Knowledge Graph update is that it cascaded into the August 2023 core update and possibly the October 2023 core update.
The July 2023 Knowledge Graph update focused on Person entities
The Knowledge Graph is Google’s machine-readable encyclopedia, memory or black box. It has six verticals, and the vertical this article is focusing on is the “Knowledge Vault.” The Knowledge Vault is where Google stores its “facts” about the world.
We started tracking Google’s Main Knowledge Graph (Knowledge Vault) in 2015 in our proprietary software, Kalicube Pro.
Google has performed a significant update to the Knowledge Vault every summer since 2015. The data we collect on each update illustrates a different focus, and each update’s focus is clearly visible in the data.
The July 2023 update had a clear focus. The number of Person entities in the Knowledge Graph tripled in four days (July 14–18, 2023), while the other entity types we track remained stable.