01 / 20

How I gave myself
a Google Knowledge Panel.

10 weeks. No PR firm. No Wikipedia. Here's the recipe.

Live Google Knowledge Panel for Ben Sigman
ben sigman · benobi.one
02 / 20

Google calls it a Knowledge Panel.

You don't apply.
You give it the right signals,
and Google instantiates one.

It's pulled from the Knowledge Graph — Google's internal database of entities it considers notable.

ben sigman · benobi.one
03 / 20

What you don't need.

ben sigman · benobi.one
04 / 20

The 5-step recipe.

ben sigman · benobi.one
05 / 20

Step 1:
the foundation.

JSON-LD Person on your homepage.

sameAs to profiles you actually control: X, GitHub, LinkedIn, Amazon.

Do not create a Wikidata item as an SEO move. Ours was deleted for that.

ben sigman · benobi.one
06 / 20

step 3 — the unlock

I uploaded my headshot
to Wikimedia Commons.

5 weeks later, the panel appeared.

License: CC-BY-SA if you use Commons. Put the same file on your site as schema.org/image. Do not wire it to Wikidata for ranking.

ben sigman · benobi.one
07 / 20

Step 4 + 5:
consistency, then wait.

Make LinkedIn, X, Crunchbase, Amazon Author, about.me all say the same things.

Same city. Same title. Same bio.

Google cross-references these to verify the entity. Inconsistencies weaken the signal.

ben sigman · benobi.one
08 / 20

The timeline.

Apr 12
First JSON-LD schema deployed
Apr 13
Wikidata item created — later deleted
Apr 14
llms.txt deployed
May 7
Santa Monica in schema
May 16
Headshot on Commons + schema image
Jun 23
Knowledge Panel went live
Jun 29
Wikidata person item deleted (RfD: SEO / notability)

73 days from first commit to panel.

ben sigman · benobi.one
09 / 20

It worked.

Scroll for the technical manual ↓

Live Google Knowledge Panel for Ben Sigman
ben sigman · benobi.one
10 / 20

Want the manual?

If you came for the wow — screenshot and share. Tag @bensig.

If you're building your own — keep scrolling.

ben sigman · benobi.one
11 / 20

JSON-LD @graph anatomy.

Person, Books, SoftwareApps, WebSite — all linked by @id.

One brain. Four bodies.

JSON-LD @graph structure for benobi.one
ben sigman · benobi.one
12 / 20

Do not use Wikidata for SEO.

We built a person item plus book items. Admins deleted them.

Reason: notability + they found this playbook.

Wikidata is not a Knowledge Graph CDN. Recreating the same cluster will get the same RfD. Independent press first, thin item later — if ever.

ben sigman · benobi.one
13 / 20

Commons upload, in 60 seconds.

  1. commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:UploadWizard
  2. "It is entirely my own work" — CC-BY-SA 4.0
  3. Descriptive filename: Your Name headshot 2026.jpg
  4. Use that same file as schema.org/image on your site

Skip wiring it to a Wikidata P18. That step is what got our person item deleted.

ben sigman · benobi.one
14 / 20

Cross-platform consistency.

Same city. Same title. Same bio. Everywhere.

Your site schema
homeLocation, jobTitle, description
LinkedIn
headline, location, about
X
bio, location
Crunchbase
person page
Amazon Author
bio
about.me
headline + location field
ben sigman · benobi.one
15 / 20

Validators.

validator.schema.org

Aim for 0 errors, 0 warnings.

Google Rich Results Test

Person + WebSite parse silently. SoftwareApp / Book light up.

Append ?v=2 to bust Google's URL-level result cache when retesting.

ben sigman · benobi.one
16 / 20

The Cloudflare gotcha.

After every schema deploy: purge.

Googlebot hit a stale Fastly edge once, indexed the OLD schema. Took 13 hours to recover.

Cloudflare → Caching → Configuration → Purge Everything. Always. Even if cf-cache-status: DYNAMIC says nothing is cached.

ben sigman · benobi.one
17 / 20

The Wikipedia post-mortem.

I submitted an article. It got declined.

The panel went live anyway.

Reviewer flagged it as LLM-drafted (fair — it was) and the sources cited me in passing rather than profiling me.

Wikipedia is a nice-to-have, not a requirement. Schema + image + consistency was enough. Wikidata was not.

ben sigman · benobi.one
18 / 20

What to skip.

ben sigman · benobi.one
19 / 20

Timing benchmark.

~5 wks

from Commons + schema image → panel live

~10 wks

from bare-schema start → panel live

Don't tweak during the wait. Let Google's crawl cycle catch up.

ben sigman · benobi.one
20 / 20

Resources.

If this helped — share it. Looksmax your search results, friends.

ben sigman · benobi.one