Advanced schema
The three levels of schema, hand-built About + Mention schema citing entities by machine ID, and the clean-the-schema + significantLink step.
Once you have an entity list with machine IDs, advanced schema is how you wire those entities into the page so Google parses the relationships explicitly. This is the deep end — most pages don't need it.
The three levels of schema
| Level | What | When |
|---|---|---|
| None | No schema | Never acceptable |
| Good-enough | Plugin schema. Yoast best; SEOPress Pro fine; Rank Math no | Plumbers, electricians, low-sophistication markets |
| Advanced | Hand-built About + Mention schema citing entities by machine ID | Lawyers, rehab. ~1 page/month per client |
Advanced schema is a last-ditch on-page lever — after on-page + Cora/POP, before spending on backlinks. Don't believe "AI loves schema because it's JSON" — zero empirical proof; it aids understanding, not citation.
Clean the schema + add significantLink
- Run the page through Zista (or the Codex script) → About + Mention schema citing entities by machine ID. On screen this was the Zista entity explorer (
app.zizta.com/entityexplorer/show-report/…, report header "SCOTTSDALE SEO") — an entity grid with a Machine Readable ID column and the generated JSON-LD below, where eachsameAsblock pairs the Wikipedia URL, the Googlekgmid=/m/…machine ID, and the WikidataQ…ref. - Read the output — it adds junk. "You gotta read this thing, because it'll add some weird shit." Keep relevant entities, drop noise, sort by relevance ("generally this is where you'd want to live, because they're all relevant to your content"), remove single keywords, leave Wikidata refs. Save. (Duplicate schema still works, but don't do it on purpose.)
- Add
significantLink— Google reads it as a backlink and it surfaces in search. On cloud pages, point it at the client's money site (01:25:06).
A Zista entity report (shown here for a different, SEO-niche site) — the sameAs arrays carry the machine-readable /m/ IDs (e.g. kgmid=/m/019qb_) alongside Wikipedia and Wikidata refs. Sort by relevance, strip the noise, then add significantLink.
4. Place it: HTML → paste into the page; WordPress → SEOPress Pro per-page, or WP Code site-wide.
"Some schema is better than no schema, and this is a pretty good schema." Don't hand-craft unless the market demands it.
Tools
- Zista.com (Muhammad; absorbed
TopicalRelevance.comby Joshua Priest) — About/Mention schema generator. Jesper Nielsen has a competing tool Clint declines to recommend. - schema.org itself — the real skill (
schema.org/website). Clint's course is onwhatRanks.com.