Do I Need To Be Notable or Popular To Get a Knowledge Panel on Google?
Advanced Expert Tips on Image SEO with Olesia Korobka 27 April 2021 at 17 H CEST (Paris)
In this clip, Jason Barnard explains that notability is a Wikipedia concept and that Google doesn’t adhere to it. Google simply wants to understand everything! Google is not a pseudo-Wikipedia. In Wikipedia, a person, a company, a music group (in short an entity) needs to be notable or popular to get a Wikipedia page. But for Google, it does not matter if an entity is popular or not. Google just wants to understand the whole world and wants to have the best possible information to provide the best results to its users. The caveat for Google is whether or not it includes the Knowledge Panel in the SERP!
00:00 Popularity is not a requirement to getting Knowledge Panel
01:08 Google just understands everything
01:57 Knowledge Panel fulfills users intent
02:41 Knowledge Panel is geo-sensitive
Transcript from: Do I Need To Be Notable or Popular to Get a Knowledge Panel on Google?
Hence the question I’m going to ask you. There is a popular belief that if you are not popular enough, you will not trigger a Knowledge Panel whatever you do. Is that true?
No. Very simply.
So you don’t have to be popular at all?
No.
Everybody assumes that Google’s a pseudo Wikipedia, which is foolish. Wikipedia has a concept of notability and the idea for Wikipedia, (and I agree with them) “what’s the point of filling an encyclopedia for humans, with people, entities, things, companies who aren’t notable, who are uninteresting to people”. If people aren’t going to spontaneously search for a person, a company, a music group, whatever it might be, there’s no real point in having them in a human searchable encyclopedia, like Wikipedia. Google doesn’t have the idea of notability because it doesn’t have that problem. Google just wants to understand.
Google is a child who wants to understand the whole world, and it doesn’t have any particular judgment on any particular part of the world that it wants to understand more or less than another. It’s just going to try to understand everything. So from that perspective, everybody can get a Knowledge Panel because everybody can be understood. And Google just wants to understand everybody because by understanding everybody, it’s much like it wants to crawl the whole web because it wants to have the best opportunity, have all the information possible in order to give the best results to its users.
So from that perspective, don’t worry about notability in terms of being understood. Notability only then comes into play in terms of, Is Google going to trigger a Knowledge Panel? And then that comes to the question of “When does Google trigger a Knowledge Panel when you search brand name?” It will trigger a Knowledge Panel if it thinks that Knowledge Panel will be helpful and useful to the user, i.e. it fulfills the intent of the user. So an author in Britain would trigger a Knowledge Panel in Britain. They might not trigger Knowledge Panel in America because the author is not known in America. So that difference is incredibly important because for an American who doesn’t know who that author is, having a Knowledge Panel would not be helpful and valuable to them because their intent would not be the author.
It would be somebody of the same name in America. Same for a company. Companies in America, in the UK have the same name, but they’re different companies. So it would trigger (theoretically) the Knowledge Panel for the British company in Britain, the American company in America. And that is good user experience because Google is hoping, expecting, and wanting to fulfill the user’s intent. And the user’s intent is often geo local.
