Google Knowledge Panel Masterclass

Transcript: Google Knowledge Panel Masterclass

This transcript of Google Knowledge Panel Masterclass comes from the video's captions, lightly cleaned. Click a time and the set jumps to that moment.

What is Google Knowledge Panel

0:00 Hey everyone, welcome back to the and today we are talking about knowledge panels. So, knowledge panels are these cool big information panels that you get when you are in the knowledge graph and there's enough search for you on Google and people look up for you. And the more interesting you the more information you have, the bigger your knowledge graph gets. So, what I want to show you today apart from my own misadventures in the wonderful world of the knowledge graph and knowledge panels is how you can find your knowledge panel, your knowledge graph, how can you manage it, how can you set it up.

Why They Matter

0:35 I think it's interesting owning an entity in the knowledge graph is cool or there's some kind of test about it, especially if you're someone that people are interested in. It would be very important if you've got a brand like a personal brand or a product brand or company brand that maybe other people are outranking you for your own name or out saying you or you want to create a link between the content that you post and your knowledge panel or there's a lot of people looking you up. Obviously, if people are looking you up because you're a consultant or a designer or a financial consultant or podcaster or YouTube channel it looks like you're much more established if you have a knowledge panel and so I can understand why people would that happen.

Myths and Authority

1:17 I think there's a bit of a misunderstanding that some SEOs in the ivory tower, which is a term I use for SEOs who get to practice SEO on very high authority sites but typically don't actually have the wherewithal to build websites from scratch. I think technical SEO is amazing. Some massive sites that we can increase the impressions by 2-3 million in a day just by adding a page or just by adding a couple of HTs. But I think the real essence of SEO is understanding authority and knowledge panels are good demonstration of that. I think there's a couple of myths that some people are portraying about knowledge panels that somehow it's like a trust factor that Google trust. Or what there I was reading a post a couple of years ago about someone who said that right after they wrote their article, Google recognized it. But, I don't think that applies to Chris. I know there's a confidence score, and confidence score mean how much Google thinks that the person you're searching for and the knowledge panel is the same person. And I've got enough confusion here and enough established profiles, so I think I can walk you through the different levels and you can follow along. Just

Google Creator Profiles - new follower requirements

2:19 Before we get into knowledge panels, let's talk about the Google Creator Program. So, the Google Creator Program and profiles is for people who have 100,000 followers. Now, that has been dropped to 35,000, according to Search Engine Land. And if you're looking for someone to follow for SEO update, I really like Barry. Google Creators 35,000 Yeah. So, here's Search Engine Land Roundtable. Google lowers subscriber requirements for search profiles. Now, the interesting thing about having a knowledge panel in the US, I think, is that you don't need 35,000 followers. Once you're in the knowledge panel, you can get a Google profile. It's a little bit limited, and if you do get access to the Creator Program, you do get access to their Discord, which is a little bit of fun. You can talk to other creators, experts, people who figured this out, and you can also talk to your Google assistants who can help you answer a question about your Google profile.

Finding Your Panel

3:18 So, the first thing you're going to need is a tool like audit.com. This one's a little clunky. It doesn't work very well if you use more than three strings or more than three words in the search phrase. And so, I can't find David G. Quaid, which is a version I was trying to create when I did get away from Dennis Quaid, but basically, you can enter your name here or your business name. And I also had a knowledge panel for my agency, which most of you will know is Primary Position, but I couldn't find it. And I couldn't find it until last week. And now that I've found it, I thought now would be time to make this video. So oddly enough when you search for it, Anderson Cooper like hacked Obama show up, which is also cat Tom Brady, but beat on my primary positions. And then I tried searching for it without the space, and that was the aha moment. And I think I had to put in primary position.com. So,

Schema and SameAs

4:10 One of the things I learned is that if you start adding schema to your pages, it can change and alter the knowledge graph entries. And so, the knowledge graph entry need a lot of a lot of search. So, you could run a Google Ads, you could get on a podcast regularly and increase searches through your name, you could look at Search Console, and see if you've got enough branded search to create schema, and then see if the schema is created in the knowledge graph and the knowledge graph is updated. So, for example, there's all of the detail grades, they all have a different ID. You need your ID, you need your profile, and you need your knowledge panel in that schema. So, what does that mean? So, if you go to Gemini, you can say create a persona schema for me, and you give it his name, and it'll find all of the information for you, right? So, here it's just doing a software engineer, and it made this up. Co-owner is probably a bit better, but you'll see that there is a sameAs. So, you can put in your name, your ID, your employer. You can also create a schema for your employer, and see if it builds something a bit smarter. So, it might actually be able to go and build one for you. Yeah, so there, founder and managing partner, right? There's my website, and then here's the sameAs. So, this is my LinkedIn, my Linktree, my x.com, my Wikipedia page, and then it creates a primary position organization. Now, I was able to find primary position as one word, and now I can. So, that's telling me that the schema that we put on primary position has altered the knowledge panel record. What's also interesting is that not all of these equate to me but not all of the art me.

5:51 A lot of them are me with different pieces of information. For example, my LinkedIn profile and so on. So if we actually go over to my current knowledge panel which is David G Quaid, it now dropped my social media panel but that's okay. So I can I think I can add them back or I can get them added back.

Claim and Verify

6:12 Let's take a look at what a profile looks like before you claim it, right? So here is why this one is clearly me because all of the results are about me as David Quaid. And first thing you do, this is the knowledge entry for this particular knowledge graph. So you can click on claim this knowledge panel. It'll bring you to the screen. You click get verified, you go through the process, you say yes it's me. What you're going to do if you've been lucky enough to find yours is you're going to say yes and then go through identification which means you'll hold up your passport or ID card to be verified online and then you will get a control panel that look like this and within an hour you should be able to suggest edits where you can click on a space like this, suggest a new photograph for example or edit or change, suggest a name change or add request that something is added. For example, I'm going to try and say please add my new that my name matches. So one of the things I had to do to get all of this to work is that on my LinkedIn, and my X and my YouTube, I went and changed my name to David G Quaid.

7:29 However, that didn't carry across. Now to get I've only got this problem because Dennis Quaid is so popular. Google sucks because they can't spell or tell the difference between David and Dennis. So I think that's more of you should be willing to be needing. You need to fix that. There's no e in David. There's also no n in David. There's also no s in David. It's not that hard. So,

Edits and Branding

7:52 Let's go back to my profile here. And I'm going to add my LinkedIn profile. There. All right, go back to Linktree. So, let's get my X profile and my LinkedIn X. That. And then actions. Profiles. What I'm also going to do is take the page with my actual schema. The first page that we created the schema, which is the name Quaid. It's Yeah, now you'll notice something. So, this is the page with my schema in it. I also have a branded domain, which I think is quite important. Why? Because you can track how many people are searching for you. You can also see, for example, on my Google Creator profile, it picked up my logo from my David Quaid, which I think that's pretty cool cuz it's got SEO here. And then it pulls in all of my posts. But in this page, I have my schema and I'm going to take this page because Google already trusts it, uses it. And I'm going to submit this because it has a list of all of my profiles. So, now I change my knowledge graph.

9:13 Okay. Because they can't share and it's Quaid. Quaid. People digging through it with me are looking for David. But they can't find my socials. We're done. Now, this is like really valuable project I right? Like this doesn't matter. It isn't going to change anything for me substantially. I was saying on on X last night as well about we might as well do it at the same time about how to build your profile and do a bit of ORM, especially if you're a founder or you're building a podcast or anything like that. I think so that the most important thing to have is like a branded domain, which you then link to all of your social profiles, your top videos that you like. I put in some of my LinkedIn comments and here I have all of my social media links to my Wiki page and also my Google follow profile. This is the page that has the schema on me and I'm going to show you that how you can even see this in Search Console, which I think is pretty cool.

10:26 And then obviously I have a Wiki and I use Linktree and all of these other pages to control which shows up. So, do I want put more emphasis on my YouTube channel, for example? I probably do. So, what I might do is create more links to my YouTube channel because now that's not showing in this particular search.

Search Console Checks

10:46 And then let's go over here. And here you can see in Search Console on the left-hand side you have all of the different thing. When you add a profile, you get a profile page here and then all of the pages with the profile pages. So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to add the schema to some of my blog posts and videos and see if that starts to change the snippet. And I'm going to show you how easy that is. And then any un parsable structured content. So, what I

Schema Errors and Penalties

11:19 Did is I went over to Data Highlighter column and made a mistake and I added incorrectly and it gives me an error. So, you can see this doesn't have a profile page because there's a parsing error. So, Google when it comes to schema, you have to get it right. Unlike HTML, where Google trusts that your HTML is actually broken, it thinks there's 16 flavors of HTML out there, and so Google bot is able to get the content it needs out by looking for text patterns. Once you make a mistake in schema, everything breaks down. I've seen sites like that are job sites that have to have schema, where you can get a manual action for making a mistake. Yep, a manual action. Now, it rolls back pretty quickly, and it can take a to a year for that to happen, but it does happen, and it's automatic, but this is what I want you to understand.

Authority YMYL Reality

12:08 Google isn't this sort of like secret police force that's spying on you all the time. That is such a myth. It's a It's a horrible myth. And he admits this, right? One, he built a scale content system live using Google Sheets and ChatGPT, and he ranked it in an hour. So, for all the people that are still pushing the sandbox idea, I'm sorry, the sandbox doesn't exist. The sandbox exists for people don't understand authority. And if we keep pretending authority doesn't exist, and I'm sorry if you get noisy and you hate hearing all the time, just block me you stop. But, we can't pretend authority doesn't exist. The sandbox is a code. Maybe that's a bit harsh, but it's because you don't understand authority. The same thing with YMYL. People well, works like this. If Google doesn't trust your page, it's not going to show, or it's going to trigger a manual action where they penalize your page, and a penalty just means that they put a backstop that your page can't rank beyond like position 55 or 100, whatever they've decided. Because your page is still goes through the Google mechanism. They still get crawled, they still get indexed, refreshed, and so on and things like that. Now, they might not get indexed refreshed, but they are sent to the indexing server. And they still rank. All of your PageRank authority is still calculated, which means when that penalty when that penalty is lifted, your site will start to return back to normal.

13:22 Don't think of Google as the police that YMYL is more about specific phrases. And if Google doesn't trust your page for that phrase, it won't show it. YMYL doesn't mean it's harder, and it doesn't mean you need to serve more E-A-T. It's just a different thing, and E-A-T isn't and annotator pedals aren't necessarily going to help with that. It really largely, I think, a vanity project and a brand protection project, and for most of us, I don't think it's going to do us a whole lot of good. So, let's take a look.

Adding Schema to Pages

13:52 What I'm going to do is I'm going to go to my blog. And so, I posted a blog post. You can see my site's not very fast, and I don't care. But, this is a blank page that ranks. Oh, sorry. I actually just posted this earlier. You can see I'm building a listicle. I'm not actually building a listicle. I'm just having fun with somebody that did some outreach that wanted me to put their agency in a page that they don't rank. And so, I'm just going to take their ranking. I just want to see how hard it is. That's just how I work as a It's just how online works as a reverse engineer. So, this page is ranking, and it's getting a lot of traffic to this video that I did with Jonathan Denwood. I think it's a great video because I don't again, a lot of people don't understand how crawling works, and let's go to the page that does work. Oh, let's go to pages here, here. View. S- Actually, I don't need to be so authentic. Edit page. By the way, this is what Googlebot sees. Googlebot sees your content in HTML. No, it does render it to see our links visible. But, things like that. And so, what we're going to do is take this script and put it into this page.

15:08 And you can see here are all my same as this. Here's my profile with there. You know what's missing? Being See, we can put them together. And so, YouTube is there, X is there. But, and this is where it starts to get complicated, cuz this isn't in here. And so, you now end up with You don't have to have this everywhere, right? Google just has to read this once, if I query it. It doesn't need all of the data, but I also created a new Facebook profile, which I kind of like. So, let me switch out of my personal Facebook, but you can create two pages. So, there you have me, and here's my business page, with my own graphic. And so, people can follow me here and message me, talk to me, but it's focused at business. So, I advise to use Have a Linktree, and then put your Linktree on your X account, so that people can go from X, and then they can follow you wherever they want to follow you, right? So, I'm going to put in current condition. It's make this more distinct.

16:25 So, here I have all of my So, that's what's wrong here. So,

Entities via Trends

16:31 But what I need to do now is find where your brand position's knowledge panel shows up. So, this is good day. Another way to look at entities and see if entities exist out here. This is it. Yes. Is it? If you go to your Google Trends, a way to see the bridge between a keyword and identity is to start typing within here. And you see there's a search term, and there's a movie. And if I put in SEO, there's the search phrase. The same as if I put in my name. And this is where it actually helps a lot because there's a search term, here it's a topic. And so I can also compare myself to you other similar topics. So for example, I could compare myself to you Neil Patel, for example. And wow, we're way off today. I could cheat and say last week. But the nice thing is that this is now a topic and that's actually a photograph from my first St. Patrick's Day in New York City after meeting you and the CEO of the startup I work at, which is really cool.

17:48 So good. By the way, also when you fill

Submit Updates Wrap Up

17:51 In these forms, you'll get a thanks for your feedback. We'll send you an update when it's done and know it takes about an hour. So let's update this. And then this is what would be really great is there's absolutely nothing on this page yet and it ranks in Google. So this is where the manual submit, manual crawl request works, right? I've updated this page and so I'm going to kick live your own and I'm going to get it updated because I want Google to read the new schema and then I want to see what happens. And if it's really interesting and if you want it to be more interesting and you want to get someone like Edward Sturm or Jonathan Denwood to cover this, then leave a comment and when we see how popular it is, it'll be something we can cover. Thank you.