Chapter 4 — Exercises

Work these in order; they climb from recall to judgment. Items marked † have worked solutions in the answers appendix (and in this chapter's answer notes) — try them fully before you peek. There are no answers in this file. Where a task says "your own site," use a real site you can access; if you don't have one, use a competitor or a favorite site you know well. Free tools named here — Google Search, Google Search Console, the Rich Results Test, Wikidata — are all you need.

A. Recall and concept

Exercise 4.1 — In one sentence each, distinguish a string from a thing (an entity). Give an example of one string that maps to several entities, and several strings that map to one entity.

Exercise 4.2 — What did Hummingbird (2013) change about how Google approached a query, and why did conversational and voice queries make that change necessary?

Exercise 4.3 † — Define entity, Knowledge Graph, and knowledge panel, and state the relationship among the three (which one is the database, which is the item, which is the visible readout).

Exercise 4.4 — Name the three mechanisms by which Google connects your content to entities, and give a one-line description of each.

Exercise 4.5 — In your own words, what does the inverse document frequency part of TF-IDF accomplish, and why does the word "the" end up with almost no weight?

Exercise 4.6 — Define co-occurrence and explain why it is a signal Google learned from the whole web rather than a checklist you assemble on a page.

B. Applied reasoning

Exercise 4.7 † — A page about "furnace maintenance" never uses the phrase "annual heating tune-up," yet it ranks well for that query. Explain, using this chapter's concepts, how that is possible.

Exercise 4.8 — Two pages target the query "furnace won't ignite." Page A is a focused 800-word answer that uses the phrase three times. Page B is a padded 4,000-word page that uses it thirty times. Using the two ideas BM25 adds to TF-IDF, explain why Page A might rank above Page B.

Exercise 4.9 — Explain why writing naturally with synonyms and related concepts now helps rather than dilutes a page's relevance. Reference at least one mechanism from §4.3 and the idea of semantic search.

Exercise 4.10 — A colleague says, "Topical authority is just Domain Authority for a topic — check the score in our tool." Correct two things wrong with that sentence.

Exercise 4.11 † — Give a concrete example (any subject you know) of breadth versus depth in topical coverage, and explain why breadth without depth backfires.

Exercise 4.12 — Explain how a language model reading word order and function words would treat "turn off water to water heater" differently from "no hot water from heater," even though the two share most of their words.

Exercise 4.13 — Why can a small, single-location business hold stronger topical authority on a narrow subject than a huge general-interest site with far more backlinks? Tie your answer to what topical authority actually measures.

Exercise 4.14 † — Google resolved "what's a good place to grab a bite near the big tower with the lights in Paris" without the query containing obvious keywords. Break the query into (a) the entity it references and (b) the intent it expresses, and explain what a pure string-matching engine would have missed.

C. Diagnose why this page isn't ranking

Exercise 4.15 † — A plumbing company's "water heater replacement" page is 3,500 words but ranks for almost nothing. Reading it, you notice it repeats "water heater replacement" constantly and never mentions anode rods, sediment, tank vs. tankless, the relief valve, or cost. Diagnose the problem in entity/topical terms, and say what you would add — without adding a single instance of the target phrase.

Exercise 4.16 — A page genuinely and comprehensively covers "how a furnace works," but it is not ranking for "furnace repair near me." Is topical depth the fix? Explain using the concept from Chapter 3 that this runs into.

Exercise 4.17 — A brand's knowledge panel shows an outdated logo and the wrong founding year. The owner wants to "SEO the panel to fix it." Explain why that framing is wrong and outline the honest path to correcting the facts.

D. Audit your own site (use the named free tools)

Exercise 4.18 † — Search your exact brand name in Google. Record: (a) do you get a knowledge panel; (b) what appears under "People also search for"; (c) does a same-named entity intrude. Write two sentences on how clearly Google seems to understand you as an entity.

Exercise 4.19 — Pick one important page on your site. List every genuinely related concept an expert would expect it to cover, then check how many it actually covers. Note the gaps — this is an informal co-occurrence audit.

Exercise 4.20 — Look at your About page as a stranger would. In ten seconds, can you tell exactly who the entity is, what it does, and where? Rewrite the first two sentences to make the entity unambiguous.

E. Research and read a report

Exercise 4.21 † — Open Google Search Console for a site you manage (or use the illustrative Figure 4.2). Pick one strong page and read its Performance → Queries list. Count how many distinct queries it ranks for versus the one you had in mind when you wrote it. What does the spread tell you about topical coverage?

Exercise 4.22 — Find an entity you know well on Wikidata (search wikidata.org). List five relationships it records (its "statements") and explain how each could help Google understand a page that mentions that entity.

Exercise 4.23 — Take one query and read the full SERP. Is there a knowledge panel? A "People also ask" box? What do those features tell you about the entities and intent Google associates with the query?

Exercise 4.24 — Compare the knowledge panels for a globally famous organization and a small local one (or note the absence of the latter). Write two sentences explaining the gap in terms of corroboration and notability.

F. Optimize and rewrite

Exercise 4.25 † — Rewrite this keyword-stuffed opening so it reads naturally and signals topical depth better: "Furnace repair Cedar Hills — need furnace repair Cedar Hills? Our furnace repair Cedar Hills team does furnace repair Cedar Hills fast." Keep it honest; do not promise anything you can't deliver.

Exercise 4.26 — Draft a two-sentence entity description for a business you know, suitable for an About page and consistent enough to reuse everywhere (the seed of good disambiguation). Name the entity type, what it does, and where.

G. Spot the myth

Exercise 4.27 † — A course promises to "boost rankings by adding the right LSI keywords and hitting the ideal TF-IDF density." Identify every false or misleading claim in that promise and replace it with the honest version.

Exercise 4.28 — "Adding sameAs schema will get us a knowledge panel." True, false, or it-depends? Justify your answer using what actually generates and corroborates a panel.

H. Ethics and risk

Exercise 4.29 — A client wants to create a Wikipedia page and a Wikidata item for their two-year-old company "to build entity authority," even though the company has no independent coverage. Explain the risk and the ethical problem, and give the honest alternative.

I. Rivertown Strategy-File extension

Exercise 4.30 † — Extend the chapter's entity-cluster map. Choose Rivertown's Cooling territory and list (a) five equipment entities, (b) five problem entities, and (c) three task entities. Then write one sentence explaining why this map is not yet a keyword list or a content plan — and which later chapters turn it into each.