Google has started showing Direct answers to questions related to SEO. That has made me wonder how m...

1. SEO from Google's Direct Answers
Google has started showing Direct answers to questions related to SEO. That has made me wonder
how much someone could learn about SEO at Google with those direct answers, and I wanted to see
what terms Google was showing results from and which sources. I expect there to possibly be a log
of churn in the answers Google shows results from.
I started off by asking about SEO itself:
I then wanted to look at some topics that might have questionable answers and advice, and asked
about the next three topics to see if SEO myths were being promoted by Google Direct Answer. It
seemed like they are given the following three answers about Reciprocal links, Keyword Density, and
LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing):

2. What are
reciprocal links?
What is
Keyword Density?

3. What is LSI
(Latent Semantic Indexing?)
Do not trust Google's Answers to those, It needs to work on improving the correctness of results,
maybe though a knowledge-based trust.
I then wanted to see how Google might describe some of it' more recent upgrades - Panda, Penguin,
Hummingbird, Pigeon, and the recently announced Doorway pages update.
Google's
Panda Update

4. Google's
Penguin Update
Google'
Pigeon Update

5. Google's
Hummingbird Update
Google
recently announced they they would be launching a new algorithm aimed at fighting link schemes
using doorway pages.
I wanted to try seeing if there were direct answers for other SEO-related terms, so I tried a few at
random:

6. What would
a search for "keyword Stuffing" bring searchers?
As SEOS, we
are often concerned with how Google migh define "Search Engine Spam" - something we want to
avoid if possible.

7. Doing an
SEO Audit for a site, it's important to know good practices for different HTML elements of a page,
like Meta descriptions.
Knowing
how to use text in links (anchor text) reasonably well can also be helpful.

8. Knowing
how to set up an XML Sitemap for a page can make it more likely that all of the pages for a site will
get indexed.
Setting up and taking advantage of the information provided at Google Webmaster Tools and Bing
Webmaster Tools can be very helpful
Many of the
tools pages and help pages from Google are in direct answers about them, with links to more
information about them
Semantic Search Topics seem to be covered well in Google's Direct Answers, like this one on Named
Entities:

9. Google uses
it's understanding of what is a named entity to provide knowledge panels to searchers.
Some specialized search results happen at Google when a query term triggers an answerbox result
at Google as well.
Answer box
results are query results that seem to answer a question based upon what may be a trigger term in
an original query
Google may show query results that have specialized features that tend to be richer than most other

10. search results, that use schema.org markup found on pages being indexed to use to display rich
snippets, which may stand out from other results and led to more click throughs - search engines
seem to like these because they make search results seem much more interesting, and display more
data in those search results.
This was my first foray into exploring Google's direct answers for SEO-related terms. I'm not
surprised that a number of them were created from Wikipedia pages, or in some cases from Google
help and support pages. There are some that seem to promulgate SEO myths, like the answers about
Keyword Density and the one about LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing), but the ones related to the
Semantic Web seem more up to date.
I'll probably be revisiting many of these to see if the sources they use for answers change over time -
I do expect some churn in those as people try to rewrite their pages to start showing up as Direct
Answers.
SEO from Google's Direct Answers
A look at direct answers that show up on the Web for SEO-Related terms.

11. http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seobythesea/Tesr/~3/i_bM6BFV2Cg/