Most effective structured data for a Person knowledge graph panel?

Question

I am trying to make sure the structured data on my personal portfolio site is set up best to encourage a Google Knowledge Graph Person panel for my name. While I know structured data alone isn't enough, I know it can help.

Right now, I have some Person json-ld written that includes a lot of info about myself such as name, jobTitle, alumniOf, address (country/locality only), and sameAs which lists my social media profiles.

According to Google guidelines they want the info in structured data to also be user-visible, however, the info referenced in my Person structured data block is not all on the same page, it's spread out across my website. My job title and location are on my /contact/ page, my alma mater is on my /resume/ page, and my main / page is what's listed by the url of the Person structured data.

Google says don't add info to structured data that's not visible, even if it's accurate:

You should not create blank or empty pages just to hold structured data; nor should you add structured data about information that is not visible to the user, even if the information is accurate.

https://developers.google.com/search/docs/guides/intro-structured-data

and that violating guidelines could prevent rich results:

Violating a quality guideline can prevent syntactically correct structured data from being displayed as a rich result in Google Search

https://developers.google.com/search/docs/guides/sd-policies

In light of that, what is the most effective way in my case to use my Person json-ld to encourage Google to display a knowledge graph panel?

Answer 1

I got the knowledge graph panel.

Here's what ended up working for me:

1. I collected all of the user-visible information about myself onto one page on my website, my /contact/ page, including name, job title, college info, social media accounts, etc.

2. I wrote a top-level Schema.org Person into the /contact/ page's JSON-LD that mirrored this same information that is visible to the reader. Specifically, I used mainEntityOfPage to hint that the page is a profile page, and used sameAs for social media, where I included the same social media links that are visible to a human visitor.

3. On my / page, I wrote a stub Person entry in JSON-LD with basically only my name, a sameAs pointing to my /contact/ page, and a mainEntityOfPage saying that this Person is the main entity of my /contact/ page.

4. I linked public structured data sources to my /contact/ page.

Answer 2

the info referenced in my Person structured data block is not all on the same page, it's spread out across my website.

Check your structured data to create compliance with the following Google requirement:

Relevance

Your structured data should be a true representation of the page content.

It may be useful to create a separate web page with your personal information and set up relevant structured data there.

The following information from the Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines of Google may also help you:

● The authoritativeness of the creator of the Main Content, the Main Content itself, and the website.

● The trustworthiness of the creator of the Main Content, the Main Content itself, and the website.

and

We need to find out what outside, independent sources say about the website. When there is disagreement between what the website says about itself and what reputable independent sources say about the website, we’ll trust the independent sources.

Using the above, you can create links to external sources that can confirm the information you provide. For example, you can specify the link of your profile in some educational organization in which you received training and set this information to the type EducationalOrganization, which in turn you can embed in the alumniOf property.

You can do this to indicate information about your membership in some associations, societies, organizations using the ProgramMembership type and embed this in the memberOf property.

It may probably be useful to establish digital copies of documents that can confirm your education, your authority and competence.

As always, a lot depends on the details (The devil is hidden in the details). For a general understanding of Google’s policy for structured data, it may be helpful to check the following remark:

Important: Google does not guarantee that your structured data will show up in search results, even if your page is marked up correctly according to the Structured Data Testing Tool. Here are some common reasons why:
...

The page does not meet the guidelines for structured data described here, the type-specific guidelines, or the general webmaster guidelines.

In my humble opinion, here Google clearly tells us that structured data is only a fraction of the overall search engine optimization of the website and this data is dependent on the content and technical optimization of the website. E.g., excellent relevant structured data may not work or may not work correctly, on a website with a low download speed or with mobile-friendliness errors. Also, structured data may provide a low level of assistance or even be ignored by Google if this data represents the low-level trustworthiness of the content.