Google rolled out a new update to Knowledge Graph that can help musicians, comedians, and venues in promoting their events to their audiences.
The update, which was announced on Google's webmaster blog, will now allow performers to add ticket links and delegated event links to their answer cards, which appear on top of or next to the search results. With the new Knowledge Graph feature, users will see the event's on-sale date, availability, and a link to the performer's preferred ticketing website on the answer card when they search for that performer on Google.
"If you mark up ticketing links along with the events on your official website, we'll show an expanded answer card for your events in Google search," says Google. "As before, you may write the event markup directly into your site's HTML, or simply install an event widget that builds in the markup for you automatically - like Bandsintown, BandPage, GigPress, ReverbNation, or Songkick."
For performers who don't list their events on their websites but put them up somewhere else, such as a festival site or event calendar, they can use delegation markup to tell Google where to extract information about their events. This also works also for comedians and venues, such as theaters, concert halls, libraries, and the like. They can add the ComedyEvent markup to their website or the Event markup for venues.
For performers whose events are ticketed by primary ticketers who already provide markup, such as Ticketmaster, Ticketfly, Ticketweb, AXS, LaughStub, and Wantickets, Google says they will not have to do anything. The search engine will simply read the markup from the primary ticketer and add the event to their answer cards.
Other ticketers who already provide markup include Holdmyticket, ShowClix, Stranger Tickets, Ticket Alternative, Digitick, See Tickets, Tix, Fnac Spectacles, Ticketland.ru, iTickets, MIDWESTIX, Ticketleap, and Instantseats.
Last year, Google introduced a new feature for performers to include a list of their upcoming events in their answer cards by using schema.org markup on their websites. This new update provides even more benefit for performers by allowing them to include direct links to their ticketing sites.
Meanwhile, Google pushed another Knowledge Graph update to help businesses promote their social media pages right on the first page of the search results.
The update was announced by Zurich-based Google webmaster trends analyst Zineb Ait Bahajji on her Google+ page, who said that businesses can now use structured data markup on their websites to include links to their Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn and Myspace pages.
