Hi all! We have a client who publishes scholarly research as a highly regarded non-profit. Their Publications aren't being indexed in Google Scholar 50% of the time and when they are, Google is pulling random stuff from a PDF vs. from the html page. Any advice on best practices is enormously appreciated
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Correcting errors in Knowledge Panel and Answer box.
My organization is lucky enough to have a knowledge panel associated with our brand search: IEEE
| SledDawg
And, I "own" the panel e.g. Google knows that I am associated with the brand and multiple web properties related to it. (IEEE has many hundreds of related websites, and the domain ieee.org is one of the oldest on the internet.) However, Google consistently displays incorrect information in the panel.
I have spent much time "suggesting edits" for these data points, with some success over time. But, there are some things that they just won't fix. If you do that search for "ieee" you can see in the panel the Executives datapoint. The two individuals listed there are not executives of the IEEE organization. (IEEE is a professional membership organization with over 400K members around the world.) Those two guys are in fact members of IEEE, but they are not associated with the central organization. The actual principals are listed on the Wikipedia page that Google is using to populate other data points since it is a "trusted source": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_of_Electrical_and_Electronics_Engineers
Despite my contacting Google over and over with the correct data, and proffering references to multiple pages that contain that data, including our own organizational pages: https://www.ieee.org/about/corporate/leadership.html
the Google team the "owns" the Knowledge Panels tells me: "We’ve reviewed your feedback, and unfortunately, the change you want to make to Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers isn’t supported at the moment. There are parts of Google Search that can’t be edited or removed, such as content that is found on publicly available websites, unless that information is inaccurate." I had a couple of messages from actual signed individuals on that team telling me that they could not make such a change, because, in effect, the algorithm was populating the Panel and it was out of their control.
This seems crazy to me. They are letting incorrect info stand for months at a time, despite a "trusted source" at the organization in question providing the correct data.
I have had similar experiences with info in Answer Box sections of the SERP, for various other organization-related data points. This is becoming internally awkward, in that members and staff see this incorrect info and come to me to get it corrected. Not to mention that it harms the organization by misrepresenting it. Thoughts? Suggestions? Have others had success in effecting such corrections?0
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