Google announced today that it will now populate its Knowledge Graph results for musicians with tour dates from the artists’ official websites when they add structured data markup.
Google has shown upcoming events for artists for quite some time (and even has reminders for artists’ releases), but now they’re getting the information directly from the source.
“When music lovers search for their favorite band on Google, we often show them a Knowledge Graph panel with lots of information about the band, including the band’s upcoming concert schedule,” says product manager Justin Boyan. “It’s important to fans and artists alike that this schedule be accurate and complete. That’s why we’re trying a new approach to concert listings.”
It’s good to know that Google is doing more to make sure info in the Knowledge Graph is accurate. We’ve seen too many times when it was not (granted, I’m not sure how bad it’s been with tour dates).
Google is encouraging webmasters of musical artists’ sites to implement schema.org markup, install an events widget that has structured data markup built in (like those from Bandsintown, BandPage, ReverbNation, Songkick, or GigPress), or label the site’s events with Google’s data highlighter tool.
For everyone else, this simply serves as a reminder that Google likes structured data, and it’s probably worth it to your site to make use of it where applicable too.
Image via Google
