How to Show Your Social Profiles in Your Google Knowledge Graph?

Troubleshooting why social profiles aren’t showing on your Google knowledge graph listing can be complicated. Here’s an example.

Video transcript:

David: Tricia, you had asked a question about the knowledge graph and appearing correctly in the knowledge graph.

Tricia: Yeah.

David: I have a screenshot you shared with me if you want me to share it.

Tricia: Yeah, I think so. I don’t know. I don’t remember what it looked like, but sure.

David: Okay, well, that’s definitive. Okay, so this is a screenshot you shared with me asking a question. Very reputable SEO company’s knowledge graph.

Tricia: Yeah. I mean, these guys are top-notch.

David: Top-notch.

Tricia: And, so, based on that, I was like, I need to look at the best of the best.

David: Oh, Wow.

Tricia: And I feel certain it’s the schema. But is it?

David: Ask your question. We’re looking at this, and there’s a beautiful red spider on it.

Tricia: Yeah.

David: So, what is the question you’re asking?

Tricia: So, this wonderful, awesome firm, Reliable Acorn, has on their knowledge panel on the side when you search for them, Facebook and LinkedIn, and their links to those profiles. When I looked up mine, I thought I had them, but I do not. And I feel like maybe I had them before I did my name change and new website. That could have been it. So, my question was, how do I get these? I think it’s through schema. And if it is, I thought at one point maybe it was local schema, but I don’t have local Yoast on my site, but I have a place to put in my profile. So, tell me.

David: Okay. Okay. So, what you really want to know is how you get Google to suggest the right social profiles in your knowledge graph listing. So, when someone searches for your brand name, Google will sometimes add in the right-sidebar information about your company, including social profiles. So, the answer to the question, as always, is it’s never as simple as doing one thing. Number one, the first thing I would check is, like you said, schema. But there’s a specific kind of schema that Google uses for populating that, and it’s called organization schema.

Tricia: Okay.

David: Organization schema is available for free to all free users of Yoast as an SEO plugin.

Tricia: I’m sorry. Say that again.

David: If you use the Yoast SEO plugin, even the free version, you can set up organization schema.

Tricia: Okay. So, I think I did.

David: Okay. Let’s hack into this website. Alright, so I’m hacking into this SEO company’s website.

Tricia:  Okay. This Master SEO…

David: They’ve changed it around.

Tricia: So, I found it in Yoast, I think, in settings.

David: Yes.

Tricia: And then, site references.

David: So, we’re in Yoast settings. And under…

Tricia: Site representation.

David: Site representation. There we go. Okay. Okay. Yes, yes. So, you can choose an organization or person here. If you’re doing a blog, you do person.

Tricia: Okay. So, organization is selected on mine.

David: Right. Okay. So, then you put your organization name. Okay, that is my legal entity’s name. The organization logo and other profiles.

Tricia: So, that’s what mine looks like, too. I’ve got all that stuff.

David: Okay. So, there are a couple of things going on here. I tried some hacky stuff, too. So, you’ll notice that Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and then there’s some other weird stuff. Forget about the other weird stuff. But if you go to your screenshot, we see Facebook and LinkedIn.

Tricia: Yeah.

David: Okay. So, we are submitting to Google, hey, in our organization schema, here’s our Facebook account, here’s our Twitter account, but Twitter is not showing up there.

Tricia: What showed up? LinkedIn showed up.

David: Yeah, I wonder which LinkedIn account it is. Oh, it is the business LinkedIn page. Okay. But I’m submitting a bunch of stuff.

Tricia: Yeah.

David: Including Instagram and Twitter, that is not showing up there. So, that tells us it’s not just the schema.

Tricia: Okay.

David: Okay So, in other words, Google really doesn’t want you to be able to gain the surfs, so they don’t want a simple submit-and-done thing, right?

Tricia: Yeah.

David: So, just like Google My Business or whatever, these days, they want verification that this is, indeed, the site that’s associated with this company. So, in my experience, the other thing… Actually, before I go there, I would confirm you’re using the canonical version of each of these accounts.

Tricia: Okay.

David: This is the actual exact URL for Facebook, with no extra parameters.

Tricia: Yeah, I must have copied and pasted because that is not how I normally would do Facebook.

David:  Yeah, clean out the gobbledygook at the end, you know, clear that out. Twitter, interestingly, just asks for the Twitter account name, not the full URL. But I’d be curious to know if I put the full URL, would that make a difference?

Tricia: So, I was looking at that and wondering the same thing. I wonder… Are you looking at validator schema?

David: Yeah, validator.schema.org. It is smart enough… Yoast is at least picking up.

Tricia: Yeah. You just did your Reliable Acorn. So, let me see what mine says.

David: So, this validator.schema.org is a great way to not only test the schema, but also you can actually edit it here and then test it again if you want to try to troubleshoot the trouble problems. It would give me a warning or an error. Warning means you’re not doing everything you could, but it’s okay. Error means there is something wrong in the schema that you need to fix for Google to pick it up.

Tricia: So, I’m trying to look and see on mine if it actually shows it’s a web page.

David: Well, it’s under web page.

Tricia: So, it does have Facebook, Twitter, and it does have all those.

David: Okay. Okay. And they’re correct in the canonical version.

Tricia: Facebook is. One question. So, oftentimes when I type, I type camelCase, so I mean, it’s probably not on all of them. I see my LinkedIn. Let me look at your screen again. Okay. So when I did LinkedIn, and I pulled it up, it had the trailing thing on it.

David: Are you using your personal or your company LinkedIn?

Tricia: Company.

David: Okay. We’re getting to the point where we’re troubleshooting this. So, this is the first thing to check. The next thing to check, I think the thing Google uses to verify this, is other websites linking to these assets, as well.

Tricia: Okay.

David: So, this is where link-building is important. Right? We know fundamentally the Google algorithm is built on links. And when I noticed this early in the life of my business, these did not show up. Or even it showed my personal LinkedIn. But once I built links to these profile pages, again to the canonical version, then Google started showing up. So, errors I’ve seen in the past are it’s the wrong LinkedIn profile page or the wrong Facebook page or Twitter account. And that is usually a function of there are links to an old Facebook page or things that are listed on other websites that are functionally linking to social media, posts, or pages. So, what you end up having to do is fix not only your organization schema but also fix the links to the old page.

Tricia: Okay.

David: And that’s part of it. Now what’s nice about social media link building is that there are a lot of websites that are hard to build links in to your website, but they will be more than willing to link out to a social media profile.

Tricia: Yeah.

David: If you go through and just do a branded search, you might find that the Better Business Bureau might allow you to add a link to your LinkedIn business page. Then add it.

Tricia: Yeah.

David: Right.

Tricia: And I think the Better Business Bureau does have a couple of links you can add.

David: Well, we can look.

Tricia: I feel like I’ve seen that before.

David: Wow, they’re an A+.

Tricia: Wow.

David: That’s amazing. Another one that’s really easy to add and really, really authoritative is Crunchbase.

Tricia: I don’t know if I…

David: This is really credible… And looky there, Facebook and Twitter.

Tricia: Okay.

David: So, those are the things I would check. So, you would look for all the references to your Facebook page and make sure the links to it are to the canonical version. Make sure that any existing sites that are linking to you, especially profile pages like Crunchbase or Better Business Bureau, are also added. If you have an opportunity, go ahead and add your social media profiles.

Tricia: Yeah. I think there are a couple that I could go out there and do and then check. Okay. Add social media, but make sure that it’s canonical.

David: It’s the same solution if the business has incorrect profiles listed in the knowledge graph to clean up and make sure they’re all correct.

Tricia: Okay. I’ll work on that.

David: But you’ll also notice, just as I do a branded search, what are the top two social networks?

Tricia: Facebook and LinkedIn, yeah.  

So anyway, that is how you do it. It’s not as easy as hey, done. But set yourself up for success by being very, very technical here.

Tricia: Yeah. I’m surprised that Facebook isn’t there. Because when I do a branded search, Facebook comes up.

David: Right. It might be because you rebranded.

Tricia: That’s what I’m wondering because, for some reason, I feel like they were on the knowledge panel originally before I rebranded.

David: Yep. So, there you go. You might have old links to your old Facebook page that you need to update. So, then you follow the branded link-building process, find them, and update as many as you possibly can. I think also a thing that happens is the more active they are, even though Google, for instance, can’t read the feeds on LinkedIn or Facebook, there are advantages for this case to be active in that.

Tricia: Yeah. Okay.