Knowledge Graph Update Displays Social Media Links Directly In Google Search Results

Google has announced an update to Knowledge Graph to help businesses in promoting their social media pages right on the first page of the search results. Additionally, the company announced another update that can help comedians, musicians and venues in promoting events to their audiences.

Google’s announcement about social media pages explained that this update is an expansion of a feature that the company enabled in November for certain public figures and artists, and is now automatically pulling in the information for most brands and businesses that generate a Knowledge Graph box in Google search results. This comes as great news for marketers, with Google search results now pulling in profiles from Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn and MySpace, and displaying the most relevant ones in response to users’ search queries. If the entry for your business is missing a profile, or is pointing to one that isn’t your preference, you can add structured data markup to your site using schema.org vocabulary and JSON-LD markup format. Instructions on how to do this can be found on the following Google help page:

https://developers.google.com/webmasters/structured-data/customize/social-profiles

The second Knowledge Graph update is for performers and venues, and will now allow the addition of ticket links and delegated event links to their answer cards, which appear on top of or next to the search results. With this new feature, when users search for a performer on Google, they will see the event’s on-sale date, availability, and a link to the performer’s preferred ticketing website on the answer card.

“If you mark up ticketing links along with the events on your official website, we’ll show an expanded answer card for your events in Google search,” wrote Google. “As before, you may write the event markup directly into your site’s HTML, or simply install an event widget that builds in the markup for you automatically – like Bandsintown, BandPage, GigPress, ReverbNation, or Songkick.”

Some performers and venues may not list their events on their official website, so Google is offering a solution for this scenario. “Now you can use delegation markup to tell us to source your events from a page of your choice on another website,” Google explained in its blog post. “Just add the following markup to your home page, making sure to customize the three red values:

<script type=”application/ld+json”>

{“@context” : “http://schema.org”,

“@type” : “MusicGroup”,

“name” : “Your Band or Performer Name”,

“url” : “http://your-official-website.com”,

“event” : “http://other-event-site.com/your-event-listing-page/”

}

</script>

The marked-up events found on the other event site’s page will then be eligible for Google events features.”

Google’s blog post continued by explaining that for performers whose events are ticketed by primary ticketers who already provide markup, such as Ticketmaster, Ticketfly, Ticketweb, AXS, LaughStub and Wantickets, they won’t have to do anything. Google will read the markup from the primary ticketer and subsequently add the event to their answer cards. Some of the other ticketers who already provide markup include Holdmyticket, ShowClix, Stranger Tickets, Ticket Alternative, Digitick, See Tickets, Tix, Fnac Spectacles, Ticketland.ru, iTickets, MIDWESTIX, Ticketleap and Instantseats.

Google’s Knowledge Graph updates are valuable for all types of businesses, from performers to car dealerships, by providing direct links in search results to the sites that the brand wants customers to see, thereby matching the growing user expectation for a quick and seamless experience when searching for information.