Thumbnail: "Google’s Three Main Knowledge Algorithms: How They Work and What you Can do to Take Advantage"

[06:39:38] Viktor Karpenko: Hi, Jason. How are you? 

[06:39:40] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): I’m fine. Thank you very much. How are you today, Viktor?

The Key Takeaways of Jason Barnard’s Presentation About the Three Knowledge Algorithms at Google 

[06:39:43] Viktor Karpenko: I’m good. I was just explaining to you today how in the morning Russia sent a lot of missiles to Kyiv and some other cities, so there is no electricity, but we are still live. So yeah, all right. So, can you please tell me the main key takeaway of your presentation today, shortly?

[06:40:11] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Right. Yeah. Absolutely no problem at all. The key takeaways are really that there are three Knowledge Algorithms at Google that we can consider. And once you understand how those Knowledge Algorithms function, it becomes much, much easier to understand how we can actually work on Google in terms of knowledge.

[06:40:34] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): As you said, I’m the Knowledge Panel expert. And that obviously means ensuring that Google understands who we are, what we do, and who our audience is, so that it can present that factual information in Knowledge Panels. And the trick is to understand the Knowledge Algorithms, and there are three: the Knowledge Extraction Algorithm, the Knowledge Vault Algorithm, and the Knowledge Panel Algorithm. And you’ll see it’s really simple when you break it all down.

Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy) on Studying Google’s Knowledge Graph and Knowledge Panels for Several Years 

[06:41:05] Viktor Karpenko: Okay. It sounds interesting. Let’s start. And I will collect all the questions, and we’ll ask you after you’re done with the presentation. Let’s go. 

[06:41:15] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Brilliant. Can you see my screen? 

[06:41:18] Viktor Karpenko: Yeah.

[06:41:19] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Okay. Thank you so much, Viktor and everybody else organising this, Anya. I’m terribly ashamed now to have complained about my flat problems. Obviously, me moving to a new flat and getting a bit stuck with my sound and my lighting isn’t a huge problem by comparison. Today I’m going to be talking about Google’s three main Knowledge Algorithms, how they work and what you can do to take advantage.

[06:41:47] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): I think, for me, this is huge. I’ve been working on Google’s Knowledge Graph and Knowledge Panels for 10 years, 7 years. I’m really seriously trying to get it a hundred percent right and ensure that Kalicube can fully serve our clients in terms of knowledge management in Google, Knowledge Panels, the Knowledge Graph, and Entity SEO in the wider sense. 

[06:42:14] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Now, the one at the bottom there, you can see the Kalicube Support Group. If you’re interested in Knowledge Panels, Knowledge Algorithms, and Brand SERPs, please do join the Kalicube Support Group. We geek out about Knowledge Panels all day long.

Introducing Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy) Through the Content of His Personal Brand SERP 

[06:42:28] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Now I’ll introduce myself, and this is how I always introduce myself for presentations like this. It’s through my Brand SERP. Now, today I thought I’d do it just through the Knowledge Panel. And as you can see here, everything in that yellow dotted line is my Knowledge Panel, a hundred percent above the fold. I actually cheated a little bit to get the music group in there, and you can see my site on the left, but actually the fold is slightly above that.

[06:42:54] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And everything above the fold is a Knowledge Panel. That means that Google is showing only things it is very sure are factually true about me. It’s presenting me in its representation of how it thinks I could or should be represented. Now, that sounds scary. You think, oh, that means Google can say whatever it wants. In fact, Google wants to be truthful. And what I’ve done here is educated Google about who I am, what I do, and who my audience is.

Jason Barnard’s Life Journey as a Student, Musician, Author, Digital Marketer, and CEO of a Company Is Categorised in His Brand SERP 

[06:43:25] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And as you can see at the top, I will start at the top, you’ve got overview, videos, books, music group, albums, education. Those are things that I’ve pushed into Google’s brain, so it understands that those are things I’ve done. I’ve been in a music group, I’ve written books, I’ve done lots of videos, I’ve made music albums, and I was educated. And it knows where I was educated, which is Liverpool John Moores University. And in fact, if you look up alumni of Liverpool John Moores University, I sit next to John Lennon, which doesn’t make me a better musician, but it certainly makes me very happy.

[06:43:58] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And I’ll go through this really quickly because it actually describes very clearly who I am, what I do, and who my audience is. And John Mueller, in fact, from Google talks about me as Mr. Knowledge Panel, as the person outside Google who knows most about how to educate, let’s say, Google to understand how it should be presenting us factually.

[06:44:20] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Now, as you can see here, multiple places where it knows I’m a musician, music group, albums, and then the music group down the bottom, The Barking Dogs. It was a folk punk group in the 1990s. A songwriter, I’ve written over a hundred songs, I think maybe 90 songs. A cartoon blue dog in a TV series. I’m an author. I’ve written a book last year. In fact, the beginning of this year, it was released. And a digital marketer, and lastly, the Brand SERP Guy, and the founder and CEO of Kalicube.

Managing Knowledge Panels by Educating Google and Its Knowledge Algorithms 

[06:44:53] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So, you can actually now already understand pretty much everything you need to about me just from looking at that above the fold, the Knowledge Panel. And that Knowledge Panel is driven by the Knowledge Algorithm. So how can you make that happen? How can you get Google to represent you that way, factually, 100% above the fold, in its own words, as it were?

[06:45:17] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): But you as the person, the entity, the company, the podcast, the music group, the music album, even the product, you get to educate Google by working the right way with its Knowledge Algorithms. So if you start off by thinking Google is a child, it’s a child who wants to understand the whole world, and it’s very, very, very confused.

The Misconception That the Web Is Well-Organised, Where in Fact It Is a Huge Mess That Confuses Google the Child 

[06:45:41] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): The web is a huge mess. It’s absolute chaos. We think as human beings that we organise things pretty well. On your own website, that might be true. Generally, it isn’t true that individual websites are particularly well organised. When you take all the different websites built by all the different people with different perspectives, different ideas, different coding systems, it gets very confusing very quickly. 

[06:46:05] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And we tend to think, I believe, that the web is well organised because we look at it through Google and Bing search. And their role, their sole aim in life is to organise the web for us, so we get a false view of how clean and clear the internet is. So, this is a child that’s trying to use the internet to understand the world. It wants to understand everything about the world, and it’s incredibly confused. It’s thirsty for knowledge.

The trick to mastering the Knowledge Algorithms is really simple. It’s to educate Google.

jason barnard (the brand serp guy)

[06:46:34] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And the trick to mastering the Knowledge Algorithms is really simple. It’s to educate Google. This is the term I use all the time. Number one, it gives you control, gives you power, and it makes Google seem less scary. Google isn’t this huge frightening machine, although it is. It’s actually a child who wants to learn, and all it needs is for you to teach it. And you teach it through its Knowledge Algorithms.

For More Information About Knowledge Panels, Kalicube Offers Online Resources and Courses All About It 

[06:47:04] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Now, I’ve got a whole talk about teaching Google the specifics to build a Knowledge Panel, and you can find those online as a lot of resources on kalicube.com, lots of videos, lots of articles, lots of case studies. Go along and look at those. You can learn all about that. And this stuff in this presentation is totally new. It only exists in our courses, as we’ll see at the end. 

[06:47:30] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And it’s an approach, a high level approach to educating Google using its Knowledge Algorithms. Now, number one is the Knowledge Extraction Algorithm, number two is the Knowledge Vault Algorithm, and number three is the Knowledge Panel Algorithm. And it’s really important to remember that none of them function in isolation.

Understanding Knowledge Algorithms Through the Use of the Chess Analogy 

[06:47:56] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Now, for people who are in the SEO industry before, let’s say, 2015, we tended to think very linearly about Google. It was the blue link algorithm, and we needed to rank number one in the blue links, and we tended to take that very much in isolation. And it was in isolation. Then you had universal search that came along, you had Darwinism in search. We then had to start thinking about the fact that these algorithms don’t work in isolation. They all play off each other in the SERP and also these Knowledge Algorithms.

[06:48:29] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So, I’ve used the chess analogy. I played a lot of chess as a child. And it really is a strategic approach. And every time you move one piece, it will affect everything else on the board. So, you can’t think simply if I do A, B will happen. Because it happened the first time, it will happen the same way the second time. There are a couple of problems with that.

Problems With Knowledge Algorithms: The Strategic Approach and the Constant Improvement of the Machine at an Exponential Rate 

[06:48:49] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Number one is strategically. When you move C, A to B doesn’t make sense anymore or won’t work in that way anymore. And the other, of course, is that Google is improving all the time. And we’ll talk about machine learning a little bit later, and I will repeat this later on, but I think we also fail to realise how fast machine learning improves these algorithms. That machine learning is improving the algorithms at an exponential rate. 

[06:49:16] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): If you talk to Fabrice Canel from Bing, he gets incredibly overexcited about it. He is Mr. Bingbot, and he builds Bingbots. And he is saying now, Bingbot is 98% machine learning, and that machine learning is improving exponentially every single day. That’s both scary and it’s also reassuring at the same time in the sense that Google and Bing are getting better and better and better and better at what they’re doing, which is trying to get the best content to the top to serve their users when they ask a question or express a problem for which they’re looking to the solution. Google and Bing want to bring that solution or that answer as efficiently as possible.

Remember, Machine Learning Algorithms Are Learning on Their Own, But It Is Not Magic

[06:50:02] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Now, the other thing to remember is it isn’t magic. I think the idea of the black box is lovely. You’ve got the black box with this magic in it. We don’t know what’s going on inside. Nobody knows what’s going on inside. The engineers at Google and at Bing have created machine learning algorithms. The machine learning algorithms by definition are learning on their own. They’re learning to learn in the case of the Knowledge Algorithms. 

[06:50:31] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So, inside of these algorithms, what exactly will trigger A to B to C to D in terms of moving forwards in what you want to teach Google about yourself, who you are, what you do, and who your audience is. Nobody truly knows what makes the needle move each time. What we can do, however, and what we do at Kalicube is analyse the data, use experience and what I call smart intelligence, intelligent guessing, looking at this and saying, what makes sense. A lot of the time, that will work. Experience, data, and educated guesses will get you a long way.

Machine Learning, the Jobs of the Humans at Google and Bing, and the Eternal Cycle to Have New Versions of the Algorithm

[06:51:09] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Now, everything is machine learning. I love this illustration. We’ve got our friend, whose name I’ve totally forgotten, Albert Einstein. Thank you very much. Over there on the left, machine learning is all about mathematics, data, which is the little green icon, and human intelligence, smart people saying, here’s what we think the features are.

[06:51:33] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Now, we call them factors in the SEO industry. What are the ranking factors? What are the knowledge factors? What are the algorithmic factors? In machine learning, they’re actually called features. The human being will give the features, they will give the mathematical formula, they will provide the data, and they will tell the machine where they want it to go, what goal do they want it to achieve. And they will do that.

Human Judges of Bing and Quality Raters of Google Assess Whether the Machine Has Achieved Its Goal and Feed It Back to the Machine

[06:51:59] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): At the top there, you can see offline. Obviously, they don’t train machines in the wild. They train machines offline. Then they push that machine learning algorithm when they think it’s good enough into the wild and Google, which gathers a loads and loads of data. I almost said a rude word. That brown barrel thing is supposed to be huge amounts of data from Google search. They then feed that into human judges, Bing call them judges, Google call them quality raters, to assess whether the machine has achieved its goal. 

[06:52:38] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And that’s crucial. They’ve told the machine, we want you to provide the best answer, the best solution, the most factual information to our users when they search on the search engine. The machine then tries to achieve that in the wild. The quality raters or the judges will then say to the machine, yes, this is right, no, this is wrong. So, they provide it with corrective data or supportive data. 

[06:53:08] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And they feed that back to the engineers, to the machine who work on it again offline. They tweak the algorithm. They feed the data back in. The machine learns where it’s gone wrong, where it’s been right. The engineers then reassess, rebuild the machine. They potentially add in a lot more data and knowledge. That’s phenomenally important. We’ll come to that later with data lakes. And once they’ve got that sorted out and they’re pretty sure, we have an update and they push that back out into the wild.

The Eternal Cycle of Taking the Data, Tweaking the Formula, and Pushing the New Version of the Algorithm Out Into the Wild

[06:53:35] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Now, at Kalicube, in terms of Knowledge Algorithms, we track these, so we know when Google are updating them. When the engineers have taken that data, tweaked the mathematical formula, pushed the data into the algorithm, and push that algorithm, the new version of the algorithm out into the wild. And obviously, that’s an eternal cycle. It goes on and on and on and on. 

[06:53:58] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And Andrea Volpini from WordLift talks about machines dancing with humans. This is very much what’s happening here. Machine learning isn’t just running around trying to figure it out all out on its own. That part in the wild, that part in the middle is obviously massive, and it generates massive amounts of data that we cannot possibly track as human beings.

Human Beings Constantly Push the Machine to Create the Best Experience for Google and Bing’s Users in Terms of Solving Their Problems

[06:54:17] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): However, the human beings do judge how good the machine has done. And our friend Albert Einstein and other engineers at Google will then reassess, rework, and tweak the algorithms and correct it when it’s really not getting it right and encourage it when it is getting it right.

[06:54:38] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So, from that perspective, we have a cycle with human beings pushing the machine to create the best experience for Google and Bing’s users on a consistent basis in terms of serving their needs, answering their questions, fulfilling or answering their problems, solving their problems, and importantly, providing factually reliable information. And that’s where we focus at Kalicube.

The Concept of the Google Dance: How Google Gathers Information Through Data Lakes and Data Rivers 

[06:55:14] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Now, how does Google gather the information? I think we now have become terribly used to the Web Index, which is a data river. I remember way back in the day, with the Google Dance, I’ve been doing SEO and working on Google since 1998. In fact, I started my first website and created my first SEO friendly pages a couple of months after Google was first incorporated in 1998. 

[06:55:39] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And at that time, the Google Dance was that you would update your website. Google would crawl the website a few weeks later, or you would submit it to Google at the time in fact. It would then crawl the website, and it would put the data in a lake, but that data would not go live in the index for several months. And you would then wait several months to see if the changes you had made had changed what you intended or not. 

[06:56:03] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And 3 months later, you would discover that it hadn’t worked. And you would then start again, change it, wait another 3 months, and that was the Google Dance. And that was because Google was using data lakes. It would add the data to a lake. It would not use it in the live index. And it would then go through the lake every 3 months, reupload all of that data into the index with the new algorithm changes, and push that out.

Even With the Current Data River Situation With the Blue Links, Google Still Uses Data Lakes for Major Updates 

[06:56:27] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And recently, the last 7 or 8 years maybe, we’ve come into a data river situation with the blue links. Whereby the data is flowing constantly past the algorithm, and the algorithm is, I like to say, looking for the golden nuggets. It’s like a gold panner. It’s got its little gold panning basket. And as the data flows past, it picks out the golden nuggets. And those golden nuggets tend to come from authoritative sites that the algorithms trust. And it will miss a lot, which is why some things don’t update and some things do update very, very quickly in the main algorithms. 

[06:57:00] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Then it pushes it all into a data lake. And that data lake is then used on the major updates, when Google are doing these huge updates that they now announce more regularly than they used to. And those are the huge changes when a lot of data will be refreshed, and that data is refreshed with new algorithmic changes from the previous step we just looked at.

Kalicube Pro Tracks Knowledge Algorithms, Knowledge Panels, and the Knowledge Graph Itself So They See When Updates Happen

[06:57:22] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Now, if you look at the Knowledge Graph, they’re using a data lake. So, we’re still in the Google Dance situation. Now, it isn’t 3 months now. It’s generally 2 weeks to a month, sometimes 3 months, depending on the time of, I was going to say the time of the year, but it’s actually the process of which they’re updating all of this. 

[06:57:45] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And if you go to kalicube.pro, which is one of our sites, which is our platform where we track this, we have 500 million lines in a database and several billion data points, tracking the Knowledge Algorithms, tracking the Knowledge Graph, tracking Knowledge Panels. You can see when these updates happen in terms of the Knowledge Graph itself. And that is incredibly important.

An Example Where Jason Barnard Tracks the Beatles Because News Cycles Around Them Tend to Be Very Focused

[06:58:11] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Because when you are looking at knowledge in Google’s mind, you have to remember that it’s not updating in real time. It’s updating over a period of time on data refreshes in the Knowledge Graph. That means that being impatient won’t help you. You have to wait until it does update. And I’ll give you a quick example. I track the Beatles. And what we see with the Beatles is that they’re incredibly good for allowing us to see when changes happen, because they’re so famous and because news cycles around them tend to be very focused.

[06:58:44] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Now, the last time we had a news cycle about one of the Beatles, it was actually all of the Beatles. It was the 25th of June. It’s Beatles Day apparently, which I didn’t know. And what we saw was a month later, there was a huge increase in the confidence score in all of the Beatles and the Beatles itself, so George Harrison, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and Ringo Starr, which shows that they’re using the data lake. The data had changed, the news cycle changed in June, but the data didn’t update in the Knowledge Graph until July.

Google the Child Learns Slowly at the Moment, But It’s Starting to Learn Increasingly Fast and Will Be Almost Real Time in a Few Years 

[06:59:13] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And when you look at the Beatles again, beginning of 2021, we saw a huge increase in the confidence score for John Lennon. What had happened is that the 40th anniversary of his death was in December 2020. And so, the knowledge updated 2021 in January with a month delay for that data lake scenario. 

[06:59:36] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So, I hope that helps you understand how knowledge is accumulated by Google and that you need to be patient and you need to understand that this child learns slowly at the moment, but what we’re seeing is it’s learning increasingly fast. Seven years ago, it was very, very slow. Now it’s slightly less slow. And in a few years, I would imagine it will be almost real time like the Web Index.

The Knowledge Extraction Algorithm, Googlebot and Bingbot, and Structured Data Like Schema Markup

[07:00:00] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So if we look at the Knowledge Extraction Algorithm, it’s Googlebot. It really isn’t very complicated from that perspective. We’re coming back to technical SEO. Can Googlebot access the content? Can it extract the content? Which is basic technical SEO. And I’m not going to teach anybody anything about that here today, but you need to think about what it’s doing.

[07:00:25] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): When we started with passage based indexing, Gary Illyes said, you can think about a page being stored in the index as mini folders. And that’s crucial. What Google does is it looks at the page, it tries to identify the centrepiece content, and that is a huge problem that we underestimate. Where is the centrepiece content? We can help the algorithm by using Semantic HTML5, by using Schema Markup to the main content page to show it, this is the main content, because it obviously doesn’t want to waste resources time after time after time on the sides or menus or footers.

For the Machine to Understand Your Content, the Different Sections of Your Page Should Be Subtopics of the Main Topic 

[07:01:01] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): It wants to spend its time analysing the core content, the centrepiece content that is what the page is all about. What it will then do is go and look at the H1, if it can find the H1, which isn’t always easy if you don’t have an H1 or you’ve got multiple H1s or you are using H1s and headings for navigation, which happens more often than what would imagine, identifies the H1 to figure out what the main pages are about, identifies the other headings to identify what the different sections of that page are about. 

[07:01:31] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Hopefully, those different sections of the page are subtopics of the main topic, if you’ve done a great page. If it’s not, the machine will immediately get confused. Then it analyses the entire text to understand is the H1 actually honest about the content of the page. And as you can see immediately, you’re getting into a problem where the machine is desperately trying to a) understand what’s in the page, but also understand what information it can extract and to what level it can have confidence in that information.

Whether It’s Google or Bing, Annotation Is Essential for Absolutely Every Other Algorithm in the System

[07:01:58] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): What it then does is it tags every element in the page. It adds an annotation. Now, this is once again Fabrice Canel from Bing who explained to me. He is Mr. Bingbot, so we can definitely understand and believe what it is he’s explaining. Annotation is absolutely huge. Now, for anybody who thinks, well, that’s Bing, it’s not Google, it doesn’t matter. Gary Illyes then said a few years later, actually, all the search engines work the same, which is what I’ve been pointing out since I’d interviewed the people at Bing.

[07:02:29] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): They all work the same. You can assume that if Bing is doing something, Google is doing something, and the differences aren’t major. They have the same infrastructure. They have the same audience. They have the same aim. So, from that perspective, with the same data, i.e. the web, the same technologies, machine learning algorithms, the same aim to serve their users as best they can, these companies don’t reinvent the wheel each and every time for themselves. 

[07:03:01] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So, what the bot then does is try to annotate each piece of information in the page and say, this is what it’s about, this is an H1, this is what it’s about, this is a an H2, this is what it’s about, by looking at the paragraph underneath, and then add a confidence score. I am X percent sure that this piece of text is about that topic and covers these entities. Then it can then add it to the index. From there, what you can immediately see is that that annotation becomes essential to absolutely every other algorithm in the system.

The Importance of Confidence and Accuracy for the Annotation of Your Content by Googlebot or Bingbot

[07:03:38] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): If we go back to Bing again, the people who run, for example, the featured snippet algorithm, Ali Alvi, and the guy who runs the video and image algorithm were very explicit. We rely on the annotation of Bingbot or Googlebot to understand whether a piece of content is even worthy of being considered by our algorithm. Without that annotation, we cannot function. Without that annotation, we cannot even start to find the content. We just ignore it. 

[07:04:13] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So, you have to make sure that that annotation by Googlebot or Bingbot is accurate and importantly confident, because the ones that it’s most confident in will get right to the front of the queue. So, that’s for featured snippet algorithms, that’s for the video algorithms, that’s for the Knowledge Panel algorithm. And here we’re talking about knowledge. So if you want to be considered by any of the algorithms further downstream, you have to make sure that Googlebot or Bingbot can annotate accurately your content and you need to be sure that it can do so confidently.

With the Use of the Machine’s Native Language Like Schema Markup and HTML5, You Can Have a High Confidence Score 

[07:04:48] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So if you’ve got a confidence score of 99% because you’ve correctly used H1, you’ve put it in Semantic HTML5 within a section and correctly mark your asides and your footer and your header and your navigation, then you’ve got a much better chance of getting that higher confidence score. If you haven’t done that, your confidence score will be lower and you are likely to be further back in the queue. 

[07:05:13] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So, in fact, we’re looking at HTML5 and also Schema Markup. A lot of us think Schema Markup, in and of itself, is going to be enough. It’s incredibly important, but what does Schema Markup do? It repeats, for the most part, what’s already in the page. It structures it and reassures the machine. So, Schema Markup is actually all about confidence. Alongside HTML5, these are the machine’s native language.

Besides Structured Data, Being Consistent and Clear Will Help the Machine Understand Who You Are, What You Do, and Which Audience You Serve 

[07:05:38] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So if you can provide Schema Markup and HTML5 that reexplain explicitly the role of each element in the page and the content of each element of the page, that’s important, the centrepiece content, once again. You are going to be winning all the way because your confidence score is going to be higher than others. 

[07:05:57] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And that is where we are starting to feed the Knowledge Graph and the other Knowledge Algorithms. Because by being explicit, by being incredibly clean, by being incredibly consistent and clear, we are going to be providing Google and Bing with information in their native language, Schema Markup or HTML5, that will help them to understand, once again, who we are, what we do, and which audience we serve.

The Knowledge Vault Algorithm and the Importance of Having a Recognised Entity Home

[07:06:26] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Now, the Knowledge Vault Algorithm. The Knowledge Vault is a machine readable encyclopedia. Why am I talking about the Knowledge Vault and not the Knowledge Graph? Because there are multiple Knowledge Graphs in Google. And for that, you’ll need to take the course and I’ll show you that at the end, but the Knowledge Vault is what most people call the Knowledge Graph. I’m now calling it the Main Knowledge Graph or the Knowledge Vault. 

[07:06:49] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): On Kalicube Pro, if you go there, you can see the query tool for the Google Knowledge Graph API. You can look inside. And it will provide you with the entities that are in there with the confidence score, the description, where it’s got the description from, and importantly, the Entity Home. Another topic that I invite you to visit kalicube.com and learn about the Entity Home, if you don’t know anything about it, or search Entity Home in SEO. We rank number one. We coined the term, so you can safely, I hope, assume that we will be ranking number one for a good time to come.

Your Entity Home Needs to Be Incredibly Clear, Consistent, Well-Written, and Have an HTML5 or Schema Markup in Place

[07:07:25] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): The Entity Home is phenomenally important. It’s the foundation of everything to do with knowledge in Google’s algorithms, so the Knowledge Vault Algorithm, the Knowledge Extraction Algorithm. Your Entity Home has to be incredibly clear, incredibly consistent, incredibly well written, and have this HTML5 and the Schema Markup in place. And for the Knowledge Vault, if you want to get in there, the Entity Home is the hub of that information. 

[07:07:55] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So, it’s a machine readable encyclopedia that Google uses to understand the world. Now, I come back to that. It’s a child who wants to understand the entire world. That’s a huge task. Obviously, it never will, but it’s going to keep trying. So, the key to this, in terms of getting into the Knowledge Vault or the Main Knowledge Graph, is the infinite self confirming loop of corroboration, a term that David Bain coined when I was talking to him on one of his shows, and the infinite loop, self confirmed loop of corroboration.

Repeating Information Around the Web and Linking From Your Entity Home, Which Is the Place Where Your Entity Lives 

[07:08:24] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): There in the middle, you can see the Entity Home. That’s my little colourful house. And you tell the machine the facts on the Entity Home. It’s the place on the web where the entity lives. It’s your canonical URL for the entity, if you like. You repeat that information on every reliable, authoritative, trustworthy source that Google is looking at, and you link from your Entity Home from that source and back to your Entity Home as much as possible.

That repetition for Google the child is always going to nail its understanding of who you are, what you do, and which audience you serve.

jason barnard (the brand serp guy)

[07:08:53] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So, Google goes round and round in circles, seeing the same information confirmed both on your Entity Home that you own, information from the entity by the entity, and every source around the web that talks about that entity. And that repetition for Google the child is always going to nail its understanding of who you are, what you do, and which audience you serve.

[07:09:16] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So, this child learns by repetition, it learns by consistency, and it learns from asking you, the entity, the person, the company, the podcast, the music group on your Entity Home, first, who are you, what do you do, and which audience do you serve, and then confirming that you’re telling the truth around the web.

The Knowledge Panel Algorithm and Other SERP Features Like the Featured Snippet

[07:09:34] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Lastly, the Knowledge Panel Algorithm. I think we should look at the Knowledge Panel as a SERP feature just like any other. It’s more complicated than any other, but it’s still just a SERP feature. And if you look at it this way, it’s simply lots of mini featured snippets. And in the course that I teach, which we launched on Monday this week, I explained exactly how this is built.

[07:10:03] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): But the quick overview is if you look at these as mini featured snippets, information that Google is confident is true, it doesn’t necessarily have to be in the Knowledge Graph to be in the Knowledge Panel. It can add information to the Knowledge Panel simply by being incredibly confident, much in the way that it would for a featured snippet.

[07:10:24] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So, this list of songs, not all of them are in the Knowledge Graph. My partner is, the TV show is, my LinkedIn profile isn’t, my website is. But you can see here that we’ve got some information that is being taken from the Knowledge Graph, and some of it is being created as dynamic mini featured snippets.

Google Is Building the Knowledge Panel as a Series of Mini Featured Snippets, Which Is Further Explained in Kalicube’s Course

[07:10:43] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And if you search around a name, Jason Barnard who is or Jason Barnard videos, if you click on one of those filter pills at the top, overview, videos, books, music group, albums, or education, you will see that the Knowledge Panel will change. And it will change obviously very quickly in real time, in 0.41 seconds when you reload the page, because Google is building the Knowledge Panel as a series of mini featured snippets. 

[07:11:09] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): How it does that exactly is explained in the course. We also have a lot of content online, which is free, on kalicube.com. You just need to read all the content on our site to figure out exactly how Google does this. So, we’re not keeping anything secret at Kalicube. We share all of this information with the idea that it’s so important that people understand how to do this.

Managing Your Presence in Google’s Mind and Remembering That Your Audience Is a Subset of Google’s Users 

[07:11:29] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): It’s really important that we learn to manage our presence in Google’s mind in terms of knowledge as best we can. It’s our responsibility as an entity to clean up our little corner of the world to ensure that Google understands who we are and ensure that information is factual and that it can use that to its best advantage, which is then going to be your best advantage when it gets it right in terms of serving the subset of its users, who are your audience.

[07:12:00] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And I think that’s really important to remember. When somebody is searching on Google, here it’s my name, it obviously wants to serve my audience. My audience wants to know this information. I’ve told Google what information I feel it needs to know, for example, the songs or my partner or my TV shows or whether I was educated, the organisation I founded, Kalicube, down there if you look down bottom right, the book I’ve written, my music album. There are actually more than that. I’m going to try to add those in the next month. And the music group down at the bottom.

You Can’t Control Google, But You Still Have an Incredible Amount of Influence Through Your Entity Home 

[07:12:29] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So, I’ve informed Google of all this information about me that my audience would want to know. And the best way Google can serve its users, who are my audience, is to provide that information to them, and if I would say so, under my instruction. Obviously, I don’t control Google, but I’ve got an incredible amount of influence in terms of what it presents through my Entity Home.

[07:12:53] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And the Entity Home is jasonbarnard.com, which is my own controlled website, where I present it with the information and encourage it, let’s say, to provide my audience, the subset of its users who are my audience, with the information that I think is pertinent in terms of my books, my videos, my music group, my albums, my company, my education, my partner, and even when I was born.

Even if Some of Your Information Is Not in the Knowledge Graph, It May Still Appear on Your Knowledge Panel

[07:13:20] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So, once again, sorry, I’d forgotten about that. We’ve got these micro featured snippets at the bottom. It’s now clear, and I should remembered that I had this slide right afterwards, to show that in fact each of those pieces of information is not necessarily in the Knowledge Graph. Liverpool John Moores University, for example, is in the Knowledge Graph, but the connection between myself and Liverpool John Moores University is not in the Knowledge Graph.

[07:13:46] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): My partner is in the Knowledge Graph, and that relationship is clearly in the Knowledge Graph. My book is not in the Knowledge Graph. It’s in the Books Vertical, which is Google Books. And that is a whole topic of why the book isn’t in the Knowledge Graph and yet triggers a Knowledge Panel and can yet also appear in my Knowledge Panel. And Google can make the link between myself and my book. And that’s a whole story for another day because it would take me several hours to explain.

Some Problems With a Name’s Ambiguity That Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy) Experienced

[07:14:12] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Same thing with the music group, The Barking Dogs, and the album, although I am connected to The Barking Dogs in the Knowledge Graph. And that took me an awfully long time because the name The Barking Dogs, right at the bottom there in the right hand corner, is very ambiguous. There are four different music groups called The Barking Dogs. There’s a pub called The Barking Dog. Google struggles a great deal with ambiguity, and that is going to be one huge struggle for anybody.

[07:14:39] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Unless you have a completely unique name as a company, Kalicube is unique, Jason Barnard is not unique, it’s a huge struggle to get Google to understand the named entity, the specific entity, and present the information that relates to that specific entity. And The Barking Dogs is a great example because there were four groups, and it got all four groups mixed up in one Knowledge Panel. And I had to patiently educate Google to separate the four different groups into four different Knowledge Panels, each with the correct albums, the correct musical style, and the correct members.

The Concept of Filter Pills on Your Brand SERP, Which Is the Start of On-SERP SEO 

[07:15:13] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Now, last point on this is your website on Google. I look at these filter pills at the top, and you look at that, and it’s simply a navigation. If you click on the videos, you’ll see a list of videos. If you look on the books, you’ll see my book and places you can buy it. If you click on music group, you’ll see the different music groups I’ve played in. These are basically different SERPs. 

[07:15:34] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): If you click on the videos, it will say Jason Barnard videos. The result will be my videos, but the result is not the same if you type directly Jason Barnard videos. What Google has done here, as you can see at the top there, those filter pills look like a menu. This is a mini website on Google. This is currently the case for films, people, music groups, music albums potentially, and songs, and sometimes books, but not for companies. 

[07:16:01] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): But it will come to this for companies. Not only will you have those filter pills at the top, it’s your mini website on Google where people can research you without even visiting your website that you need to control. You need to manage this because on-SERP SEO is going to be absolutely huge in terms of Brand SERPs, searching people’s names, searching company names, searching product names. On-SERP SEO is something we cannot avoid, that we need to learn to manage starting today.

Kalicube Has a Free 17-Point Checklist for Managing Your Knowledge Panel, Which Is Based on the Kalicube Process 

[07:16:36] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So if you want to take this much further, we’ve got a free checklist. You can go to kalicube.com to download it or join the Kalicube Support Group and ask on there where you can get it from. It’s absolutely free. It’s a 17 point checklist by what we call now the Kalicube Process. If you want to learn the Kalicube Process, search what is the Kalicube Process on Google. It will come out on top.

[07:16:58] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): It’s the 17 point process to manage your Knowledge Panel and manage Google’s understanding of your entity, so it can present your entity, person, company, product, music album, music group, film, whatever it might be. That Google could present it as accurately as possible, as positively as possible, and as helpfully as possible to your audience because they may no longer be visiting your website, if you are in that circumstance.

Also, Kalicube Academy Offers a Knowledge Panel Course, Which Is Presented on 5 Hours of Video

[07:17:28] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And if you want to learn a lot more, you can take the Knowledge Panel course. That’s on Kalicube Academy. If you go to Kalicube Academy, you can find that. We released the soft launch on Monday. It’s 5 hours of video, hundreds of secrets that I haven’t shared with anybody before, some of which I’ve explained today, but 5 hours of the equivalent of what you’ve just listened today in 36 minutes, 5 hours of that. There’s a lot to learn. 

[07:17:56] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And honestly, I wrote the course. And as I was writing it, I went through everything I said and I thought, do I know that or do I just think that or am I just guessing? And every time I thought I’m not actually sure, I researched, I figured it out, I did a test. So, it’s taken me a few years to build that course, and now I’m so pleased with it. And honestly, I would pay myself to take my own course.

For Agencies and Clients, Kalicube Pro Provides a SaaS Platform and a Done-for-You Service

[07:18:20] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And agencies, if you’ve got an agency, we’ve got Kalicube Pro SaaS, which is an automated system for doing that work of the infinite loop of self corroboration. We use it for our clients. We have a done-for-you service that we offer to our clients. If you’re an agency, you can do that. And it’s incredibly effective for managing knowledge in Google’s brain. 

[07:18:43] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Generally speaking, we can get Google to understand it in 3 months, and we can get it to be incredibly confident in that understanding within a year. So, a year long project to get Google to understand who you are, what you do, and which audience you serve. And to present that perfectly, a hundred percent above the fold in a Knowledge Panel. 

[07:19:01] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Remember, a Knowledge Panel can be a hundred percent above the fold. This is what the future looks like for people, for products, for books, for companies, whoever you might be. Thank you very much.

How Can You Access the Free Knowledge Panel Checklist That Kalicube Offers? 

[07:19:15] Viktor Karpenko: Thank you so much for this presentation. It’s interesting. How do you get that checklist? Do you have a link or do you need to go to Kalicube and just try to find it?

[07:19:29] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): If you go to kalicube.com, it’s right at the top. There’s a whole bar at the top, a blue bar. Just click on that, and you can get that for free. If you join the Kalicube Support Group down at the bottom, search on Google Kalicube Support Group, we talk about Knowledge Panels and Brand SERPs all day long. So if you come to the support group, somebody there will point you to the correct URL. But in kalicube.com, you’ll be able to find the checklist.

The Google Coati Algorithm, Which Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy) Admittedly Has to Learn More About 

[07:19:54] Viktor Karpenko: Okay. Thank you so much. So, I have some questions. First one: Hi, Jason, do you believe in Google Coati Algorithm? What are the main features of this one?

[07:20:10] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): I’m not sure what you mean by the quality algorithm. 

[07:20:16] Viktor Karpenko: It’s Coati. 

[07:20:21] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Coati? Coati.

[07:20:25] Viktor Karpenko: Yeah. Coati. 

[07:20:26] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Oh, right. Now, I’m going to have to admit I don’t know what that is.

Google’s Perception Of Trust and Authority of a Website Before It Displays a Featured Snippet From It

[07:20:35] Viktor Karpenko: Okay. So, in your opinion, does Google have strict requirements for the website about trust and authority before Google displays a mini featured snippet of the website? What do you think? 

[07:20:51] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Yeah. Whether or not Google will take information from a website and show it in a Knowledge Panel doesn’t depend on the authority of the website in and of itself, nor does it depend on any of the traditional metrics that people use from Moz or Ahrefs or anything else, because you can be an authority and trusted for a specific entity. It’s very, very, very, very granular. 

[07:21:18] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So, for example, with The Barking Dogs, the group down there at the bottom, or Boowa and Kwala, who are the albums just above and the TV shows right there at the top on the screen, if you can still see that, my site is an absolute authority on that. I can feed Google pretty much anything I want, and it will show it in a Knowledge Panel for The Barking Dogs, for Boowa and Kwala, the TV show, because I’m an authority and I’m trusted on that, but I’m not trusted as an authority on a lot of other things. So, I wouldn’t pretend that my website is a trusted authority, generally speaking, but it’s a trusted authority for those specific entities.

You Have to Look at the Trust and Authority of Your Website Granularly and Build Up Google’s Confidence on That Specific Topic

[07:22:00] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And if you think about the Entity Home, which is the website you control, Google is looking to find information from the entity about the entity, explicitly looking for it. And your job is then to build up Google’s confidence in your trustworthiness and authoritativeness on that specific topic for that specific entity. So, really, you got to look at this granularly.

[07:22:28] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): In the Kalicube platform, we track that. And we’ve got a public list of trusted sources, which is a rolling 30-day one. So, we’ve only got about 250 visible at any time, but we have 40,000 different domains that have provided descriptions in Knowledge Panels and about 100,000 have provided information in Knowledge Panels. And that’s a huge number. And it isn’t just Wikipedia, it isn’t just LinkedIn, it isn’t just Crunchbase. It’s all sorts of very strange and unusual sites that you wouldn’t imagine because Google trusts them for the specific entity that it’s representing with the Knowledge Panel.

Google’s Problem About Knowledge Panel Spam, Which Is Commonly Caused by Having Too Much Schema Markup 

[07:23:07] Viktor Karpenko: Okay. Thank you so much. What can be considered as spam in structured data, like Schema Markup? There is a recent Google amendment without clarification.

[07:23:25] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Well, Knowledge Panel spam is something I think that’s hugely problematic for Google. Knowledge Panel spam, I actually recently wrote a short article on Kalicube about that. If you look at spam from the point of view, if you are creating content or doing something specifically to trick Google or to make Google do something that you want that isn’t actually aimed at your audience at all, that’s spam. 

[07:24:00] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So, for Schema Markup, an example of spam would be to put too much, to put immense amounts of spam. I’ve had a client who did that, who thought the more I put, the better. It’s actually better to put less and more precise and more meaningful. So, Schema spam would be too much or lying, giving false information.

By Using Kalicube Pro to Inject Schema Markup Into the Entity Home, Jason Barnard Discovered the Importance of Putting the Right Amount of It 

[07:24:24] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Another example, which we found very interesting at Kalicube, is we have a little snippet of Schema Markup that we inject into the Entity Home. That’s all we do Schema for. People ask me about Schema for all sorts of different things, but we now only focus on the Entity Home so that we are injecting exactly the Schema that Google needs for any given entity type. 

[07:24:45] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And we have found that the more we put in, the less well it performs. And so, we’ve reduced it down to exactly what we know Google is looking for and reassures Google. So, it’s not so much as spam, but it’s overload in terms of Schema Markup. It’s really easy to go into overload, add too much stuff, or get confused on confusing. So, I’m confused because I’m not sure what I’m trying to express. I, therefore, become confusing when I’m putting the Schema Markup in place.

With Schema Markup, You Have to Consider What You Are Trying to Express and What Is the Main Purpose of Your Page

[07:25:15] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Another huge problem Google has is multiple Schema chunks on any given page. And we see that a lot when somebody has added Yoast and then WordLift on top or Rank Math. It’s a great plugin, but people go a bit mad because you’ve got too much control, maybe. And so, they add lots of different Schema, and you end up with loads of different chunks of Schema that don’t make sense.

[07:25:40] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): One thing about Schema is you need to think, what am I trying to express? What’s the main purpose of this page? And the main purpose of this page cannot be five different entities. So, the main purpose needs to be expressed on the Schema in a very linear fashion. And if you look at anything that doesn’t make sense to me as a human being, I don’t know what to focus on, the machine has got the same problem.

Considering You Follow Kalicube’s Checklist, How Long Does It Take to See Changes on the Average? 

[07:26:02] Viktor Karpenko: Thank you. Next question is how long does it take to see the changes on the average, when you do all the recommendations according to your checklist, usually? 

[07:26:19] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Yeah, no. I’m sure it’s one of those terrible questions. It’s a great question, but it’s also a terribly difficult question to answer. But in fact, I’ve triggered maybe a thousand Knowledge Panels, so I’ve got a good idea of how long these things take. I would say you need to count 3 months to start seeing some action, as it were.

[07:26:42] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): You need to look at a further 3 months for it to start to appear on the Brand SERP, because of the difference between having a Knowledge Panel that exists in Google’s brain and getting it to trigger when you search the name of the company or the person. So, that’s 3 plus 3. Then what Google will do is A/B test for another 6 months.

[07:27:02] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So if you apply everything in our checklist for a year, you will end up with a stable Knowledge Panel with a decent amount of information in it. Not necessarily a hundred percent above the fold, that’s taken me years to build, but you’ll have a good Knowledge Panel that will tend to trigger as long as it’s not too ambiguous as a name. You can expect 3 months to get the Knowledge Panel to trigger, 3 months to get it to appear on the Brand SERP regularly, and another 6 months for it to stabilise and become information rich.

The Idea of a Tipping Point: Google Crawls the Information You Added and It Immediately Triggers in the Knowledge Panel

[07:27:32] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Having said that, there are times when an entity is at what I call tipping point. And sometimes you will add some information, Google will crawl it, it will go straight into the Knowledge Panel Algorithm through the data river system, and it will trigger pretty much immediately. And sometimes you get a really pleasant surprise like that, and it’s delightful.

[07:27:53] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And that tends to be the moments when Google has almost understood or has understood and is not quite confident enough. And typically, those are the moments when you join just the right two dots. We had an example of a very famous actor who was struggling with his Knowledge Panel. We joined two dots using Rotten Tomatoes, and it all flowered and came beautiful and blossomed in 3 weeks. And it was one of those wonderful moments when everything comes together.

Kalicube Helped a Client Called Jason Hennessey to Merge His 4 Knowledge Panels Into One Through the Use of Google’s Knowledge Algorithms  

[07:28:22] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And we had a client recently called Jason Hennessey, who’s an SEO in the law sector, who’s came to us because he said, well, I’ve got a problem, I don’t understand why I’m not able to enrich my Knowledge Panel. And the answer is because he had 4 different Knowledge Panels. Google thought the same Jason Hennessey was 4 different people. 

[07:28:41] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So, we merged all 4 Knowledge Panels together, and he has a Knowledge Panel, which is pretty much as good as mine. And that was simply because Google thought it was 4 different people. And once it understood it was the same person, it just put it all into one Knowledge Panel using the Knowledge Panel Algorithm. Because the Knowledge Vault was okay, the Knowledge Extraction was okay, it’s just the Knowledge Panel was confused. 

[07:29:06] Viktor Karpenko: Yeah. That’s cool. It’s cool that you figure it out for him.

We now say at Kalicube, it isn’t a question of if we can do it. It’s how long it takes us.

jason barnard (the brand serp guy)

[07:29:16] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Yeah. It’s our specialist work. It’s what we do all day. I love it, and I love it when it all comes together and it works. And that’s another thing. We now say at Kalicube, it isn’t a question of if we can do it. It’s how long it takes us.

After Merging Them, How Long Did It Take to See Changes for Jason Hennessey’s Knowledge Panel?

[07:29:32] Viktor Karpenko: Yeah. And how long did it take for Hennessey’s to appear? We were talking 3 months and maybe 1 year. And if you are lucky, maybe 3 weeks, but it’s not for sure. How long after you made Google understand that it’s not 4 different people or just 1 person, after you change all that? 

[07:30:01] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Yeah. It took a little over 2 months for us to merge the Knowledge Panels. And as soon as we merged them, it just flowered into this beautiful Knowledge Panel. Now, it’s very stable. So, he was in the situation where Google had understood it was just fragmented. One sign of that that we had was that one Knowledge Panel had one social profile. Another Knowledge Panel had another social profile. So, Google was just saying, I’m not sure that this is the same person. As soon as we explained that to Google, it was super happy.

Currently, Kalicube Is in the Process of Helping Jason Hennessey to Change His Description From SEO Professional to Entrepreneur

[07:30:33] Viktor Karpenko: Yeah. And it’s cool. It says SEO professional. That’s cool. 

[07:30:41] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Yeah. And we’re now in the process of working with him to change that to become entrepreneur. So, we can also change these kinds of things. Say, what do you want to be known as? Do you want to be an entrepreneur? Do you want to be an SEO professional? Do you want to be an author, in my case? Or do you want to be the CEO and founder of Kalicube? Which is what I’m now working towards. We’re currently doing an experiment of moving me from being Jason Barnard author to Jason Barnard CEO and founder of Kalicube.

Where Is the Best Way to Update the Knowledge Panel When Another Brand Has the Same Name?

[07:31:08] Viktor Karpenko: That’s cool. Okay. So, I have more questions. So, it’s another question from the chat. Hi, Jason. Thanks for the great information. Where is the best way to update the Knowledge Panel info if there is shown another website with the same brand name in a different niche?

[07:31:32] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): There isn’t really a very simple answer to that. If you want to educate Google that these two entities are different and the niche that the other entity is in is indeed different, you need to focus on the specific niche centric, authoritative, trustworthy sources. So, what you would then do is work on ensuring that you explain very clearly on the authoritative, trusted sources in your niche and that you use your Entity Home to point to them for Google, either using Schema Markup or a traditional link, which is just as good as Schema Markup in terms of indicating to Google where the information is.

[07:32:11] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And one hugely important thing that people overlook is your entity description. Make sure your entity description is incredibly clear, and you can use Google’s own NLP. In Kalicube Pro the platform, we actually have a tool that allows you to do that. And you will be able to see that you can pull up different entities depending on how you describe them.

Using The Barking Dogs as an Example, Google Can See the Relation Between Two Entities When It’s Both in the Knowledge Graph

[07:32:32] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And I’ll give the example of The Barking Dogs. I said there were 4 different groups. I wrote my description of The Barking Dogs, and it got the wrong Barking Dogs. I then added members of The Barking Dogs include Jason Barnard, bloody bloody blah. And then it got the right Barking Dogs immediately.

[07:32:47] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So, that’s what I meant by my name and The Barking Dogs are related in the Knowledge Graph. And if you mention both entities in the same sentence, Google suddenly recognises, oh, it’s not that Barking Dogs, it’s the other one that Jason Barnard was in. So, that is hugely important and vastly underestimated. And once again, on kalicube.com, there’s an article that explains how to write a great entity description.

Does It Depend Only on the Amount of Brand Organic Traffic to Outperform Other Websites With the Same Brand Name? 

[07:33:08] Viktor Karpenko: Okay. Thank you for the answer. And one more question, does it depend only on the amount of brand organic traffic or the factors that can help it outperform other websites with the same brand?

[07:33:24] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Oh, I like that question. That’s a great question, whoever asked that. It might have been you, Vkitor. No, it wasn’t you. There is actually. It’s a really interesting question because the volume of searches is hugely important, as that person has guessed, but geo region is super important too. If you take Mary Moore in America, it’s Mary Tyler Moore that will show up. If you look in the UK, it’s Mary Moore, Henry Moore’s daughter. If you look in Australia, it’s a judge. 

[07:33:57] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So, the geo region will change phenomenally what Google will show because it’s a question of probability. What’s the probability that this person is searching for that entity? So, search volume is important, but geo search volume and also geo cultural interest, geo press. The probability that somebody’s looking for Henry Moore’s daughter might also be affected by the news cycle around Henry Moore’s daughter at this particular time in the UK that isn’t repeated in Australia or in the US.

The Reason Jason Barnard Dominates Among the Other Jason Barnards Is Because of Google’s Confidence With His Information 

[07:34:25] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And the third one is confidence. If you look at my Knowledge Panel, there are 300 Jason Barnards in the world. There’s a footballer, there’s a podcaster, there are digital marketers, there’s a hockey player in Canada, and yet my Knowledge Panel appears like this around the world. Why? Not because I’m more famous, not because it’s more probable either through the news cycle or the search volume or not even click data. It’s through user behaviour data from the SERP itself, which Google and Bing do use in terms of how they build the SERP. 

[07:34:58] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): The reason that mine dominates is pure confidence. Google is so confident in the information it’s got about me that it shows me just to show off. It’s like a child saying, look, I know this and I know it’s right. So, confidence, once again, I said it right at the beginning when I was talking about Google’s Knowledge Extraction Algorithms. How confident it is in the annotation, something it tags onto that annotation is phenomenally important. Here, what it shows can depend immensely on confidence. If it is so confident that this is true, it will put it up there simply because it’s sure it’s true.

The Difference Between Brand SERPs for Companies Versus Brand SERPs for People 

[07:35:39] Viktor Karpenko: Yeah. That’s cool. A question from me, is it the same, for example, when you do for person, it’s like you are making a personal website, you get articles from the sources Google likes. But if it’s a company, for example, when you type Apple, you want to see Apple and it’s Knowledge Graph on the right, but there’s still some ads and other stuff. So, how different are Brand SERP for companies and persons?

[07:36:22] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Yeah. A company, generally speaking, you’ve just given the example of Apple, so that’s the exception of course. But generally speaking, company names will be less ambiguous, especially in geo regions, because of local trademark laws and company registration laws. And also, generally speaking, people will look for a slightly original name, give or take, an exact match domain name from 15 years ago that used to work incredibly well.

Companies Tend to Have Less Problems of Ambiguity Than People, Which Is a Huge Problem That’s Going to Get Worse

[07:36:56] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And for people, you’ve got an incredible problem with ambiguity because so many people share names. So, for a company, you will run less into the problem of ambiguity. I’m not saying you won’t, but you will tend less to have that problem. And for people, it’s always a huge problem. And it’s a huge problem that’s going to get worse as Google understands more and more of the world. 

[07:37:18] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Right now, if we come back to me, I dominate Jason Barnard because of that confidence. As Google gets better understanding of the podcaster, the hockey player, and the footballer, I’m in trouble because there will be ambiguity and I will disappear in Canada and in South Africa.

The Effects of Trademarking Things in Protecting Your Space But Lessening the Value of a Term

[07:37:38] Viktor Karpenko: Okay. And one more question, you mentioned Jason and he has this book for SEO. And when you type this book name, before there were other companies’ guides, and now it’s on half of his screen book. Don’t you think people in most of the niches can do trademark on their terms or books and just do Knowledge Graph and just take most of the traffic? Is this the main reason or not?

[07:38:17] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Yeah. Then you’re moving gradually into what would be Knowledge Panel spam. It’s creating an entity just to dominate a specific keyword that you want to dominate. And that’s certainly possible, certainly something Google is fighting against that they don’t want to happen.

[07:38:35] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): With my book, The Fundamentals of Brand SERPs for Business, the book appears when you search Brand SERPs. It’s the definitive work on that topic, so Google would want to show the definitive work on something. But yeah, there’s huge opportunities for things to go horribly wrong for Google in that sense. And trademarking things is a good way to protect your space, but it’s also a good way to actually make a term less popular and therefore less valuable.

To Know More About Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy), Just Search His Name or Kalicube on Google 

[07:39:08] Viktor Karpenko: Yeah. Okay. Thank you so much for a good and useful presentation and for answering the questions and for your time sharing your experience. If you want to know more about Jason Barnard, just go to Google and type Jason Barnard, Kalicube, jasonbarnard.com, and just explore all his sources. Yeah. Thank you so much again.

[07:39:37] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Thanks a lot, Viktor. Have fun, everybody. Bye bye.

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