With the new release of Yoast SEO 3.6, I decided to test out their new walk-through setup.
As someone who’s been studying SEO to one degree or another since the 1990s, SEO in and of itself is no great mystery to me. The bare bones of how it works, how you make good content, is understandable. But what Yoast SEO does, and what I like it for, is it makes it obvious to people without my experience what is needed. It also takes the generally good SEO of WordPress (and a good theme) and optimizes it for the myriad, constant changes that Google does.
For that, the walk-through is a wonderful idea. I like it. I think new users will love it. I think it’ll lessen the barrier to those people who are told “You need a website!” but no one is willing to (or able to) sit with them and help them get started.
Initially I was super impressed. Yoast had clearly studied the aspects of walk-throughs that had worked and that didn’t, lifting pages from other complex plugins that needed to be used by, perhaps, non-technical savvy people.
Being asked what kind of site I was running was brilliant. For the purposes of this test, I decided to use my community/wiki/library – LezWatchTV. And right away I ran into a problem.
The tool wanted me to say if I was a company or a person.
Well … Neither. I’m a community site. Or maybe a group? Either way, the two designations didn’t really apply properly. Where was “Other”?
This couldn’t be Yoast making a boneheaded maneuver, I realized. Few people know better than Joost and his crew what WordPress is used for. They’re smart people. They’ve seen more of the Internet than most of the rest of us and they know well how it’s used. So could the screwup be Google or Schema.org?
I went to Schema.org to look up how they would classify the site, and determined that DataCatalog was the most appropriate. Alright, knowing there was a good classification, I looked back at Google’s Knowledge Graph.
Google’s Knowledge Graph is a weird thing. It’s Google’s attempt to figure out how to answer your questions. You know how you can type in “How do I do X?” into Google and you get that interesting formatted answer?
That’s from their Knowledge Graph. But more importantly, so is this:
The more you dig into it, the more you realize that the only boxes like that are for people or companies. So the breakdown is that Google has not yet figured out how to flag non-people non-companies.
This means my ultimate question of ‘what I am?’ has become a little more existential than I’d wanted, and a little simple. It’s not a person, therefore it must be a company. And while that is entirely, totally, daftly incorrect, it’s also less incorrect that a person.
Thanks, Google.
