First Party Websites: What You Need To Know
What is a First Party Website?
A first-party website is a website that you own and control one hundred percent. Your own company website is a first-party website, and if you have a podcast for your company, that would also be a first-party website. A person’s personal website is a first party website for them, but not for their company.
For Jason Barnard, his first party websites are jasonbarnard.com, thebrandserpguy.com, Kalicube.com, Kalicube.pro, Kalicube.academy, withjasonbarnard.com, and kalicubetuesdays.com. These websites are websites that Jason Barnard directly controls. This means that he controls the information that appears on them, and therefore can add anything he wants (from changing the layout, adding headings, schema markup, images, pop-up windows or overlays).
For Kalicube, our first party websites are thebrandserpguy.com, Kalicube.com, Kalicube.pro, Kalicube.academy, withjasonbarnard.com, and kalicubetuesdays.com.
How Do First Party Websites Fit Into Brand SERP Optimisation and Knowledge Panel Management?
Using First Party Websites in Brand SERP Optimisation
In the context of Brand SERP Optimisation, you want these sites to appear on the first page of your Brand SERP when a user searches for your name or company in Google. Since you can control them, you can improve your Brand SERP directly by changing the meta title, and descriptions, adding Schema Markup, including a Featured Image … and MUCH more.
Google considers that these First Party Websites are helpful to our users, and so ranks them page #1 of our Brand SERP: kalicube.com, kalicube.pro and kalicube.academy. Owning three results makes optimising our Brand SERP MUCH easier.
An extreme case of First Party Websites on a Brand SERP is when the company owns all the blue link results. This is called “Doing a Disney”.
Using First Party Websites in Knowledge Panel Management
In the context of managing Knowledge Panels, first-party sites are less useful. If I publish a fact on one the Entity Home (which I own), it is an essential confirmation of the facts about my entity for Google, but if I publish the same fact on a second, third and fourth First-Party Website, the additional confidence Google gets from it is small.
Corroborative information on First-Party Websites has a VERY fast rate of diminishing returns for the Knowledge Algorithms and, by extension, Knowledge Panel management.
