Jason Barnard at Digital Olympus 2019

Jason Barnard talks about The Google Cookbook - Making Content Easy to Digest

Google’s food is information. It needs to identify, collect, chew, swallow and digest in order to be able to give the answers to users. We look at leveraging Schema.org markup, Dom extraction, semantic triples, tables and lists to prepare Google’s food. We meander through a lot of questions and come up with some interesting explanations. Schema markup is like recipes and food items (that analogy doesn’t fly for very long). When you rebuild your site, start with thinking about structured data, since that encourages us to better organise categories, pages, and even Fraggles. I realise that I have been saying that I am a double bass. Alex gives me a taste of my own medicine by asking a question I wasn’t ready for. I wriggle through by quoting Jono Alderson and Cindy Krum – chunks, blocks and Fraggles. I cite so many people, it is starting to feel that I don’t have much to say for myself. Conclusion is “Help the Google Beast / Pet” and it will help you.

Track Your BrandLog in

Jason BarnardSEO is AEO. Welcome to the show. Jason Barnard.

Alexandra TachalovaOkay, so today I have a pleasure to interview Jason Barnard. And so, I'm very excited about that, and I'll try my best. We're going to talk today about The Google Cookbook - Making Content Easy to Digest, which is actually a very big problem because it's very popular to have all those long-form content, but it's really hard to ... Just to read them. And so, I guess that's a very hot topic nowadays.

Jason BarnardYep, it's a very big topic too, and I'm going to talk about it tomorrow, so I've prepared it all, finished the slide deck this morning, and I'm ready to rock with this one.

What do you mean by digest?

Jason BarnardI like the idea that Google is having trouble, not only collecting its food, which is information, but also swallowing it, and then digesting it, so that it becomes energy for Google. Isn't that a lovely, lovely idea?

Alexandra TachalovaYeah, very, very, very good kind of comparison. Really.

Jason BarnardI just made it up. I hadn't thought about that one, which is really stupid of me. Because I wrote the questions. Yeah, so it needs to identify, collect, swallow, and digest all this information to become energy, to be able to give the answers to the users. And that's a phenomenally big problem for Google.

Alexandra TachalovaOkay, so it's just more about understanding what's going on, on particular pages and giving the right results to people. Based on this data.

Jason BarnardYeah.

Alexandra TachalovaOkay. So, you talk about four main focal points. Let's go through them one by one. Starting with structure data schema, which is very popular right now- tell me how it relates to digesting by Google.

Jason BarnardWell, the structure data, as we all know, just confirms what's already on the page, so Google would've swallowed rather the information on the page, even though it wasn't structured. But it won't be fully confident it has understood it. So, you put the schema markup, and then it becomes incredibly confident and that's what I would call digesting

Alexandra TachalovaSo, ingredients really. So, "this is cucumber and it was organic".

Jason BarnardYeah. Exactly. So yeah, you can give it all the information ... Break your food down into an ingredients. I don't know how far this is going to fly as an idea, but we can keep trying. But you break it down. It's name value pairs, so it really knows what you're talking about. And one thing I see is the people go, "Okay, great. I'll use it." And what they don't realize and probably what they don't do, is use it all over the place. You have somebody like Martha van Berkel who says, "Use it on every page." Bill Slawski will tell you the same thing. Aaron Bradley will tell you the same thing, and they're all right.