Linked profiles

What we check

We compare two things on the home page:

1. Linked profiles: links to Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, TikTok, X, Xing or Pinterest, usually in the footer.
2. sameAs details in the structured data of the company, that is the machine-readable list of its profiles.

• If there are profile links but no sameAs details, there is a warning.
• If there are neither profile links nor sameAs, a note without a points deduction.
• If the profiles are named in sameAs, everything is fine.

This check counts for little, at most 5 of 100 points in the area.

Why it matters

Many companies and organisations have similar names: a bank shares its name with a city, a brand with a product, and "Smith Carpentry" exists in many towns. For people the difference is recognisable from the context, for machines not always.

The sameAs entry says: "This LinkedIn profile, this Instagram account and this website belong to the same company." With it Google and AI assistants can reliably combine information from different sources: reviews, photos, posts, job offers.

This has two advantages:

• Fewer mix-ups with companies of the same name.
• More trust: a company whose website, profiles and directory entries match looks more credible to machines than one about which only a single source exists.

How to fix it

Add the field sameAs with the full addresses of the profiles to the company entry in the structured data:

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "Organization",
  "name": "Example Ltd",
  "sameAs": [
    "https://www.linkedin.com/company/example-ltd",
    "https://www.instagram.com/exampleltd",
    "https://www.facebook.com/exampleltd"
  ]
}

Include only profiles that clearly belong to the company, no private profiles of employees.

WordPress

• Yoast SEO: under "Site representation" there are fields for the profiles of the organisation. Yoast takes them over into sameAs automatically.
• Rank Math: under "Titles & Meta › Local SEO" or in the social settings you enter the profiles.

Website builders

Wix and Squarespace partly link social media profiles from the settings automatically. Check with the validator whether they appear in the structured data. Otherwise add sameAs in custom JSON-LD.

How to check it yourself

In the Schema Markup Validator (validator.schema.org) you see the field sameAs with all profiles under the company entry.

Frequently asked questions

Which profiles should I include in sameAs?

All official profiles of the company that are actively maintained: LinkedIn company page, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, but also entries such as the commercial register, Wikidata or an industry association.

We have no social media profiles. Is that bad?

Not for this check, it then costs no points. A maintained profile on Google, LinkedIn or an industry directory does help to confirm the company as real and active, though.