Koray Tuğberk Gübür's topical map framework, in plain words

Who Koray Tuğberk Gübür is, and where the framework came from

Koray Tuğberk Gübür is an SEO consultant and the founder of the agency Holistic SEO & Digital. In February 2021 he published a case study on Oncrawl, Importance of Topical Authority, that put the topical map and topical authority into the SEO industry's everyday vocabulary.

His own account of how he got there is short. He started in SEO in 2015, in the casino industry, per the author box on his articles. On 1 August 2018, Google's Medic update hit that casino network. "We lost 3,000 websites," he told Sitechecker in a 2023 interview. After that he started reading Google patents and research papers, and he says he has used topical maps in his projects since 2018.

He credits the late Bill Slawski, who wrote about Google patents for many years, for teaching him to read them. In the 2021 case study he calls Slawski "our educator", and his July 2022 Oncrawl article opens "In memory of Bill Slawski".

The name stuck to the idea. When we searched "topical authority" in the US on 12 November 2026, the knowledge panel beside Google's results was about him, not a definition. He wrote three articles for Search Engine Land in 2026, and he sells a course on the method. This lesson uses only his free, public articles. Where a term is defined only in his course, I say so.

I learned this framework from Koray's work, and the way we build maps at FrameworkSEO builds on it. That is the reason for this page: every other lesson in this library links here when it uses one of his words.

What a topical map is in Koray's framework

In Koray's framework, a topical map is the full plan of the pages a site needs on its subject. It is chosen from why the site exists, linked in a set order, and finished before the first article is written. The pages, headings and links built from that plan are a separate thing, which he calls the semantic content network.

That order is his first instruction. Step 1 of the February 2021 case study reads: "Create a Topical Map Before Starting Publishing the First Article." Most guides sort a map out of a keyword export. In his method the map comes first, and the searches follow from it. The general idea of a map, without his terms, is in What is a topical map?.

His quick inputs in 2021 were five, in this order:

1. Crawl competitors' sitemaps to see their topical maps.
2. Pull related queries and related topics from Google Trends.
3. Collect autocomplete and search suggestions.
4. Notice how competitors connect their hub pages.
5. Use Google's Knowledge Graph to pull the related entities, the named things a topic is made of.

He added a line no page ranking for his name today repeats: "Also use other search engines. I especially recommend you check Swisscows to understand a semantic search engine's nature. Do not solely focus on Google to understand semantic search."

By 2024 the term had become a product category, and he pushed back. In 3 Suggestions about Topical Authority (5 February 2024) he wrote: "Do not believe auto-generated topical maps." And: "Asking ChatGPT for 20 types of X won't give you a topical map about X." In June 2024 he added that "creating a topical map is not merely listing keywords or entities".

The five decisions every Koray topical map starts from

Every Koray topical map starts from five decisions: why the site exists (source context), the one thing it is about (central entity), what visitors come to do (central search intent), the pages that sell (core section) and the pages that build trust over time (outer section). He lists the five by name in a 2025 LinkedIn post on the outer section.

Source context: why the site exists

Source context is the reason the site exists and how it makes money, and it decides the angle of every page. His 2023 definition, in How to Expand a Topical Map for Higher Topical Authority?: "Source Context is the perspective and function of the website and the brand on the open web that involves monetization, and existing purpose."

His example: the question "what is an electronic bicycle" should be answered differently by a site about electric cars, one about renewable energy and one about engineering. The definition, the internal links and the angle all change with the site. The same article says source context decides "the topical map's core and outer sections".

Central entity and central search intent: what the site is about, and what visitors do

The central entity is the one subject every page of the site is about. His public articles say his full definition is taught in the course; his 2023 article on entities and attributes says the concepts of central entities are "explained in the Semantic SEO Course". His public advice that matches it, from February 2024: "Reflect the overall topicality of your source site-wide with universal elements such as footer, header, sidebar, and company definitions."

The central search intent is defined only in the course. His course describes it, in notes students have published, as the union of the source context and the central entity, written as a verb and a noun. For our site that reads: plan the pages a business needs.

Core section and outer section: the pages that sell, and the pages that build history

The core section holds the pages closest to the sale, where he says the money is made and ranking signals gather. The outer section holds the topics further from the sale but still connected, which earn the impressions and clicks that become the site's history. The split, and how to draw it, has its own lesson: core section and outer section. The first three decisions are covered in depth in source context, central entity and central search intent.

How the parts of the framework fit together

The parts fit in one order, and each depends on the one before it. The reason the site exists sets what the site is about and what visitors do. Those split the map into a core and an outer section. Each page then gets its angle, headings and links. The pages go live in batches, and the search engine judges them over time.

Koray calls the built version a semantic content network. In his January 2022 Oncrawl case study it is "the sum of topical map, and individual content designs that include all of the headings, questions, heading levels, anchor texts, content hierarchy, and positions within the site-tree". The map decides which pages exist. The network decides what each page says and how it links. That step has its own lesson: semantic content networks.

Publishing is part of his method, not an afterthought. He launches networks in batches. On one education site in that case study, two networks went live between May and September 2021. Then the engine does two things he names. The initial ranking is "the rank of a document on the SERP immediately after being indexed". The re-ranking is the engine moving pages "based on the feedback of the users, or relevance, and quality evaluation algorithms". Over months, that record becomes historical data, the second half of his formula.

A decision lower in the chain cannot fix one above it. Good headings do not rescue a page in the wrong section. A complete map does not rescue a site whose reason to exist points somewhere else. His own words, from February 2024: "If your source context is irrelevant to your topic, the high authority references, whether links or linkless mentions, won't bring you closer to your industry's central query networks."

Koray's vocabulary in plain words, with the source for each term

Koray's vocabulary is easier to learn sorted by when you need it: terms for planning the map, terms for writing each page, and terms for what the search engine does after you publish. Each term below has one plain sentence and the article where he uses it, with the year.

Terms for planning the map

QDP is the most useful of these for a beginner, because deciding page or section is the hardest call in any map. It has its own lesson: when a search deserves its own page. Gaps and bridges are how a map grows after launch, covered in expanding a topical map, and bridges are the rule behind internal links in a topical map.

Terms for writing each page

Information gain has its own lesson, information gain, because the patent behind it says less than SEO folklore claims. One link here is mine, not his. His query templates are the planning side of what Google's AI Mode posts call query fan-out, where one question is split into many searches. A map that covers a template's variations already has pages for the searches the engine fans out to. More on fan-out in semantic SEO in plain words.

Terms for what happens after you publish

Cost of retrieval is now inside his formula, so it has its own lesson: cost of retrieval. Initial ranking and re-ranking explain why a new group of pages can jump and then drop before it settles, which is how we tell whether a map is working.

Download the Koray glossaryCSV for Google Sheets or Excel. 37 terms, one row each: the stage, the plain meaning, his wording or the closest public source, the article and its year, and whether the definition is public or course only.

The topical authority formula, version by version

Koray's topical authority formula has three published versions. In February 2021 it was topical coverage times historical data. An undated bio on his course site writes the same two terms with a plus sign. In 2026 it is historical data times topical coverage, divided by cost of retrieval, and "interpreted with visual semantics".

In the 2021 case study he defined both terms. Topical coverage "means how well you cover" the graph of connected topics. Historical data "refers to how long you have been covering this topical graph at a certain level." Then: "Topical Authority = Topical Coverage * Historical Data." Multiplying is the point. Zero on either side gives zero, however big the other side is.

The 2026 version adds two ideas. The first is cost of retrieval, which he defined in 2022 as "the ratio of the cost experienced during crawling, understanding, evaluating, indexing, ranking, and serving, and the value obtained afterwards". It divides, so needless pages make authority smaller. The same 2026 article says it plainly: "every unnecessary page increases the cost of retrieval."

The second is visual semantics: the layout carries meaning too. In one 2026 case he made 19 changes on a converter site. The biggest gain, he reports, came from moving a calculator from the bottom of the page to the top.

"Historical data" changed meaning along the way. In 2021 it is time spent covering the topic. By 2023 he writes that a source "needs to stay in the results with higher click satisfaction for a certain amount of time". Time became behavior: history now means how searchers responded, not only how long you were there. The lesson on cost of retrieval shows what the new divisor changes on a real map.

His published case studies and the numbers he reports

Koray has published case studies since 2021 with large reported gains. One site went from 10,000 to over 200,000 monthly clicks in five months; another gained over 1 million extra clicks in three months. These are his numbers, from his own Search Console, Ahrefs and Semrush screenshots, with no control site.

For maps you can open row by row, see topical map examples.

What search engines have confirmed and what is his interpretation

No search engine has confirmed Koray's framework. Google confirms parts of the idea in its own words: a site should have a primary focus, and Google runs a topic authority system for news. A Microsoft patent and a 2024 Google leak describe measuring a site's focus on a topic. The rest is his model, built from patents and his own tests.

The Microsoft patent that defined topical authority five weeks before he did

Microsoft filed a patent application in July 2019 that defines a website's "topical authority" on a topic. It was published on 7 January 2021 as US20210004416A1, five weeks before Koray's Oncrawl case study. It was granted on 16 January 2024. I found no sign that either side knew of the other.

Its baseline model is a product, like his. It multiplies three things: the site's rank from links, the clicks the site gets, and "topic purity", defined as "the percentage of pages within the site s that are tagged with topic t". Topic purity is squared, so it counts twice. An improved version also multiplies by the logarithm of the site's page count. On a log scale, growing from 100 to 200 pages adds the same bonus as growing from 1,000 to 2,000. The click counts can come from "Bing's anonymized traffic log", and the granted claims give one site "multiple topical authority scores" for different topics.

Both formulas multiply, but they reward different things. Koray's coverage asks how completely you cover the topic. Microsoft's purity asks how much of your site is about it. A site can be complete and still diluted by pages on other subjects. Google's leaked siteFocusScore points the same way as purity. My reading: treat his coverage as complete and focused, and keep the outer section on the topic. An outer section that chases any traffic lowers the one thing the engine texts measure most directly.

The patent shows what Microsoft's engineers designed. It does not show that Bing ranks this way today. The same caution holds for the information gain patent Koray cites. Search Engine Journal counted "automated assistant" 69 times in its latest version, against 25 for "search engine". More on that in information gain.

Where independent evidence agrees, and where it is silent

• Focus matters: Google's guidance, the leaked siteFocusScore and Microsoft's topic purity all point the same way. This is the best-supported part of his framework.
• History on a topic matters: Google says so for news (2023). Microsoft's patent counts clicks over a period. His shift from time to click satisfaction matches both.
• Links still matter: Microsoft's formula starts from link-based site rank. Koray agrees in his own words, "It is not Links vs Semantics; it is Links in Semantics" (2024), but links are not in his 2021 formula.
• No outside evidence: the core and outer split, quality nodes, momentum and the exact form of his formula. These come from his case studies.

Koray reads engines through patents and results pages. He says he does not trust their public statements: "it is not trusting Google's official announcements, but trusting the Google search result pages" (2023). I take a different line in this library. I cite Google where Google has spoken, Koray where he adds what Google has not said, and I label which is which. The wider evidence for topical authority is in topical authority.

Five misreadings of the framework, checked against his own words

Five readings of Koray's framework circulate that his own articles contradict: that the central entity is your brand name, that source context means authority, that a tool can score topical authority, that an AI list of subtopics is a topical map, and that more pages build more authority.

The third and fourth matter most when you shop for help. Tools now sell a score from 0 to 100 for each of his five decisions, and generators promise a map in minutes. His own words rule both out. Our test of the generators is in topical map tools and generators. And if you want to know where the word "topical map" came from before SEO borrowed it, read where the topical map came from.

We built our own system on his framework, which is how a map of about 159 pages takes us about two to two and a half hours. If you would rather have the map made than build it by hand, that is our growth plan.

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