James Dooley
knowledge panels for affiliate sites. Today I'm joined with Mike Love and I want to talk to you about obviously you do a lot with schema with structured data with JSON LD and stuff like that and obviously now you're doing a lot more with KGM ids. If anyone that doesn't know what that means it stands for knowledge graph machine ID and optimizing for the knowledge graph. So, it's a pleasure having you, Mike. And let's jump straight in. I'm going to start with a simple question. Can an affiliate site have a knowledge panel?

Mike Love
Yes, they can.

James Dooley
Okay, so the next question is, how does someone who's watching this that's got an affiliate site get a knowledge panel? How do they get one being created?

Mike Love
Uh, so you could say the the the the usual route is kind of brute forcing it. So trying to just over time get enough press eventually maybe hoping to get some sort of Wikipedia page or enough people talking about you that in the end Google just creates one due to search demand and enough volume of discussion online. Um the next route would be going down a slight e-commerce route like maybe adding a small e-commerce shop to your affiliate site and getting the knowledge panel that way via like the Google Merchant Center route which you'll see a few big sites have got. they'll just sell t-shirts or some branded gear and then they'll go down that route. Um, another way say of doing it is getting a Google My Business, making yourself classed as an internet marketing service or something like that shouldn't quite necessarily accurately say what you are. If you had a gardening affiliate site, then put yourself as a gardener isn't always the best way of doing it. So, there are a few ways of doing it. Um and obviously the there's another way that could be like by publishing things like books or journals.

James Dooley
It was quite a loaded question. It's almost like asking how to rank a website and there's a million and one different ways of doing it, isn't there? I wanted to throw you straight in the deep end. So with regards to that and obviously let's break it down a little bit further. So you first and foremost, do you think it's important for an affiliate site to have a knowledge panel?

Mike Love
I didn't originally think it was that much. I just thought I guess we've all for years I've been doing content and link building. Trying to get branded search and doing some off-site stuff with socials and things like that. There's a lot of affiliate sites that have just kind of gone and made social profiles and thought, what's the point? Like no one's ever if someone wants to search for reviews of air fryers, they're not going to first dive into who's got the best Facebook page about air fryers. They're just going to Google it. Affiliate marketers have always been kind of slightly lazy with the socials, I guess. And recently, like we've been discussing in our group, haven't we? How we think it's important that you can spend $4 or 5 a day building up your social profiles with some Facebook ads or with some Twitter ads just to get a little bit more activity on there. especially as social profiles themselves are ranking a lot more. I think as a result of that, people not really doing much off-site marketing, people have always just done content and links, they've always just thought, yeah, knowledge panel is fine if you're a musician or some sort of celebrity or someone that people would Google. And a lot of affiliate sites, they are like, yeah, the air fryer review site, the lawn mower review site. So, they don't necessarily get branded searches anyway. And we've seen in recent years, especially in this helpful content update, that Google wants to rank real businesses. If you're a real business, you would probably have a knowledge panel, wouldn't you? So, it makes sense to to work hard at getting one.

James Dooley
Yeah, for sure. I mean, anyone who's watching this, make sure you check out the link in the description. Myself and Mike do an in-depth podcast episode with regards to a dollar a day social media kind of promotions. It's about exactly what Mike was talking about there, being omni channel and being omniresent. Having whether that's a Twitter or an Instagram or a YouTube or a Facebook channel. And what they'll start to do is you'll start to spend a little bit on just doing a little small campaign on boosting that kind of status. And if it does start to get traction and a lot of comments and a lot of likes, what you can then able to do or if it's a video, if it's being the high, it's got high watch time, what you can then start to do then is start spending maybe 5, 10, maybe even 15 or $20 on that specific video. And it's a great way of boosting up your social media following. It's another way of starting to increase branded search in time. The more following of what you get, those little micro wins all the time start to compound. But anyway, back to knowledge panels. So, another question. So, let's say Mike, you've got a gambling affiliate site. How important is it for you as being the founder or whoever's attached as being the author for them to get a KGM ID and for them to get a knowledge panel? We're speaking about an affiliate site itself getting one, but obviously me and you, we share a group together, Semantic Co, where we talk quite a lot about this and we talk a lot about the owner trying to get one, which then makes it easier for the affiliate site. But can you explain why it's important for the owner or a writer on that site to also be looking to get a knowledge panel?

Mike Love
I'd say two reasons. So people have always said with regards to entities in Google's knowledge graph, an entity must be connected to another entity. So if your branded entity that the affiliate site name is unknown in the Google knowledge graph, but maybe you yourself have a little bit of a presence, then you're connecting yourself to the entity by saying you're the founder or the owner. So that's going to help. Secondly, there's a Google patent came out quite a few years ago that was I think it was called entities as experts where they were trying to decipher especially with regards to like your money or your life queries who is actually an expert and who's just a madeup pen name, who's a fake author on a site. And I think because of that a lot of affiliate marketers started doing things like adding doctor's names to their site if they were a health site and things like that which doesn't necessarily work. So by being seen as an expert in the industry, it will help you rank better. And that's not just a case of saying putting your name on your affiliate site and saying that you're an expert. It needs that third party cooperation. So if you were going to hire a doctor to review your medical articles on your health website, you would need also the doctor to be on other channels such as their social channels like LinkedIn saying that they work for your website or on their own website saying that they contribute to you or press releases saying that you as an affiliate brand have hired this person because they are an expert and getting those third party mentions. But going back to the entities of experts, Google doesn't just want to rank Joe Blogs who's, you know, gone out and spent $10,000 on backlinks. They want to rank real experts. And I think you've seen that shift over time, especially with the helpful content update. Why do you think it is e-commerce sites are ranking more now rather than blogs even if the e-commerce site has got a rubbish article and you yourself with a blog has a better article? It's because in terms of like the knowledge graph, Google knows a lot more about the e-commerce site probably because it's got a legal name attached to it, a business address attached to it, maybe some Trust Pilot reviews and things like that. the e-commerce site looks more like a legit or is a legitimate business and you as Joe Blogs the blogger does doesn't really have any entries in the Google knowledge graph. So I think that's why it's important that you yourself build up a presence in the knowledge graph as a subject matter expert. I think that's why digital PR has been working well over the years because oftent times when you get a mention, say from a top UK newspaper, for example, they won't necessarily link to your page on your website, but they'll say James Dooley, owner of XYZ business, and it's getting that third party corroboration in a top, you know, high domain rated newspaper.

James Dooley
I think there's a few bits in there that I kind of want to re-emphasize to people that's watching this. So you mentioned a third party corroboration. So instead of if you've got a health site, not just adding a doctor on, there's almost got to be a reciprocal link both ways. Doctor needs to be connected back to your site, not just you connecting it to the doctor for it to work. Otherwise, people like, "Oh, I just go and do an EV charger website and add Elon Musk on and I'm now got authority." Well, it doesn't work that way. Elon needs to be connected back both ways with third party corroboration, not just a first party saying it. I think that becomes very important when people are looking at entity SEO if they want to call it that or knowledge graph optimization or whatever it is. There needs to be this first party, second party and third party corroboration of what's going on and it needs to be seen across all three ideally for everything on the spider's web to start being connected. But with regards to so obviously let's say yourself you can go and offer a book and you can go get yourself a knowledge panel for a person and then you're connecting that entity as you as a person through to your affiliate site. But on the affiliate site, let's kind of break down a few things so people have got a few key takeaways of why it's important for them. You mentioned e-commerce and straight away if you're going to get like a Google merchant store by getting a Google merchant store is like writing a Google book and that automatically gets their website their e-commerce website a KGM ID which then means they're a known trusted source. You mentioned Trustpilot as being a very trustworthy site that's also massively cited. It's one of the most cited websites in the LLMs in AI as well. So trying to get ranked in the AI, you need things like Trust Pilot. So do you think an affiliate site should have a Trust Pilot as well?

Mike Love
I think any site can have them, don't they? But Trust Pilot, they're a bit cheeky in that they skew the ratings against you if you're not actively paying the $300 a month or whatever extortionate amount it is that they charge for. So if your average affiliate site that might only make a few grand a month, they might not see it as a worthwhile expense. There obviously are cheaper options like I think reviews.io comes in at like $80 a month or something. So that's pretty trusted as well. There's some other ones as well that I mentioned, but yeah, it's obviously a bit harder with regards like business overheads for an affiliate site to go and blow loads of money on this sort of thing when they wouldn't see a return in it in the same way that an e-commerce site would do when it's got customers actively searching for reviews.

James Dooley
So, what about a Crunchbase profile? Should every affiliate site be looking to go and get a Crunchbase profile?

Mike Love
I think like we've said after helpful content update that Google wants to rank real businesses and if you've got your random affiliate site that's just a WordPress blog at the end of the day with a simple about us page and there's not really a lot of stuff going on there that if you've gone the extra mile and you've gone and made these social profiles, you have some social activity and you have some other off-site stuff that's not necessarily just Facebook and Instagram and that sort of thing. If it is Crunchbase, then why would you not? A real business has a Crunchbase profile. So why should you not an affiliate site?

James Dooley
And then what about like a telephone number or an address an email address and stuff like that clearly seen. So if someone wants to raise a complaint against your website or wants to know where you're based and stuff like that you think that's now important as well for an affiliate site.

Mike Love
I do. Google said years ago that they wanted to see for e-commerce sites they wanted to see things like returns and shipping details, terms and conditions and that sort of thing. I think the same is like with regards to affiliate sites. They want to see that it's a real business, so that you're not just a random WordPress blog with a contact form on there. People obviously don't want to put their home address on there. You can easily go and buy yourself a business address for 40 quid a year, $40 a year or something like that. It's even less, I think, in the US. You can go get an ESIM for $2 a month. So, you've got a phone number then to attach to the website that goes in the schema that gets mentioned on other third party sources. It's all going to help, isn't it?

James Dooley
And then I want to move on. You mentioned their schema. Obviously, you did a course many, many years ago, which a few of my members of staff did doing advanced schema strategies. There's some people out there in the SEO community that kind of say that schema is not even needed. It's not even needed for SEO, but I think they're thinking it's a push button kind of it's going to fix all your rankings and that's it. But can you explain to a few people watching this how important schema actually is especially for affiliate sites but also especially for knowledge panels. So I know personally like I used to think schema wasn't important and then I started to realize that confidence and clarity is one of the most important elements of knowledge panels specifically and can you expand a little bit on that of what schema actually does and how it improves clarity and confidence?

Mike Love
I'd say that first is yeah, schema reduces that disambiguation. So if Google's reading your page, it's easy to make mistakes if your page isn't written in like a very formal Wikipedia style manner in semantic triples with tables of data. If you're like an e-commerce site and you want a fancy looking page for customers or it's some sort of local lead gen site and you want to attract people to get in touch with you, you don't want to put all that stuff on there. So schema reduces that disambiguation. It increases the clarity and the confidence in what you're explaining to Google who you are and what it is that you do. And then with regards to the knowledge panels, it's like the glue that holds it all together. Google sees this information about you scattered all over the web. It sees a Facebook page. Does it know that it's your Facebook page? You might not link to it. It sees the Crunchbase profile. It might see a Wikidata profile. especially if you're in a niche where you know you might have a site in the UK that's got a similar name to a site in the USA people might be thinking well whose Facebook page belongs to who and schema is like the glue that holds it all together says look this is who we are and this is where else you can find us on the web and fires off those other links to those other profiles and there's obviously a lot more that you can do with schema with regards to like sculpting your entity awards won people involved in what it is that you know about what services you provide and that sort of thing. It's not just simple name and same as profiles. There's obviously a lot more to it.

James Dooley
Yeah. So, for anyone who's watching this and you're in the affiliate game, it seems to be that the quality threshold has been it's got to be better. There's so many people that's been hit with a helpful content update. It does now seem to be everyone was saying, "Oh, I'm just going to change my site to be an e-commerce site." Right. But if you start understanding the reasons of why ecom hasn't been hit like affiliate and people did just used to publish a lot of content. People used to think it was good quality, do topical authority and hit it with a lot of links and think that was good enough. But what they wasn't doing was actually building a real brand and trying to get a knowledge panel for these affiliate sites. Both me and Mike are in a private group and we think it's very important. Hence the reason of we've created this video. So, we're hoping if you have got an affiliate site, if you don't yet have a knowledge panel, go out there and try and get one. Attach a real name, address, phone number, email, returns policy, and try to get go and get yourself that KGM ID that's needed for long-term trust for affiliate sites. Mikey's been an absolute pleasure.