Many businesses find themselves in a situation where they have to deal with negative reviews after they are already placed on their website.
In the following podcast and transcriptions, you can learn more about the steps you can take to have positive positioning online, far in advance of any negativity making its way to first page results and tarnishing your brand.
Paul Warren:
But I’m really excited because we have a great guest today that’s going to be talking a little bit about online reputation management and the platform that he’s building out. Today, we have Jason Barnard for Kalicube. It’s a SaaS platform that helps you with all of your online reputation management. We’re going to be going over that, how they’ve automated this process, and the things that you need to look at when you’re doing this yourself. Jason, how are you doing today?
Jason Barnard:
I’m doing absolutely fine. Absolutely lovely to be here. You guys are pumped, and I’m pumped too.
Paul Warren:
Very, very. So tell us a little bit about your platform.
Jason Barnard:
Yeah, Kalicube is basically a platform. It’s a platform that’s indirectly online reputation management because Kalicube aims to provide you with a prioritized task list to take control of your brand SERP. Your brand SERP is what appears when somebody searches your name, which is often where that online reputation management comes to the fore and where it hits brands and people in the face when they get something bad. The idea is to take control of it so that should anything bad come up you’re already in a position … A., it probably won’t, right, because you’ve already controlled it, but if it does, you’ve got the tools and the means to actually get rid of it very quickly. So proactive online reputation management is what I would be calling it.
Jason Barnard:
It goes further, in fact, than that because it also helps you with your knowledge panel, and a knowledge panel, for people who don’t know what it is, it’s the thing on the right on desktop that shows what Google thinks or understands you to be. It’s, from Google’s point of view, factual understanding of who you are and what you do. If you can get one of those, it means Google is interested in who you are and what you do, and it makes it much, much easier for you to then communicate to Google what is going to be good for your brand SERP, and what’s good for your brand SERP, from Google’s perspective, is what is going to be valuable and relevant to your audience.
Paul Warren:
Yeah. So I think what’s really, really awesome about this topic, because it’s the opposite of what, I think, Ryan and I usually have to deal with when it comes to dealing with brands, is where they come to you with some issue that’s already really bad, right? There’s already some terrible negative review or some website that’s trashing their brand, and they’re like, “How do we fix this?” So, yeah, you’re a really smart guy. You’re doing it the opposite way that we usually deal with it, and you’re just being proactive in putting this stuff out there.
Jason Barnard:
Yeah, I mean-
Paul Warren:
So a little bit about that, do you focus on maybe different Web 2.0 websites and stuff like that to build out brand profiles on it, or how exactly does the software work?
Jason Barnard:
Right. Well, what Kalicube actually does, it’s … I’ve been doing this for seven years. I started off with my own brands, so what appears when you Google my name, Jason Barnard? If you Google it, Google it now, not you personally, anyone who’s listening, and you’ll see there is only me on that page, and it’s all digital marketing on the left-hand side, all very impressive. It’s my Twitter boxes, it’s Search Engine Journal, it’s SEMrush, it’s WordLift. It’s all of these terribly well-known or impressive or respected digital marketing resources, and on the right-hand side, you’ve got the knowledge panel, and it contains a photo, probably a description, my homepage, and the songs that I’ve written that I was in a cartoon, so it’s got that in there. It’s got my music group in there from the ’90s, and it’s got associated entities who are other digital marketers. So, basically, you’ve got my life story in one page.
Jason Barnard:
Importantly, what dominates by far is what I’m currently doing today, and that’s really, really important. Google wants to show the actual current information about you. The fact that all of these profiles and elements are things that I either control or semi-control, people like WordLift, I know them very well, so I can ask them to change things, or Search Engine Journal, I control the page directly because it’s my author’s page. So the idea here is to say, “I need to control that page,” and that basically comes down to what Kalicube does, is it goes through this SERP, it goes through lots of related SERPS. It’s my secret sauce that I’m not going to tell anybody, and it figures out which sources are important to Google so that you can focus on the ones that really matter in terms of how Google builds its understanding of you and what it should be showing on your brand SERP.
Jason Barnard:
I was looking at it the other day for myself, and I was very surprised because I’ve been working on my own for seven years, so I know all the profiles that are out there, and I would have guessed 90% of the priorities, but I still got 10% wrong because I have human bias and the machine just went, “Nope, you’re wrong,” my machine. I built the machine, then I looked and I went, “That 10% is wrong,” and then I looked into it and I thought, “Actually, that 10% is right and the machine’s beaten me,” and it’s my own stupid machine that I built on a Sunday afternoon.
Paul Warren:
So I got a quick question about these, right? I manage a brand. I have to manage this myself, right, so I know exactly where you’re coming from.
Jason Barnard:
[crosstalk 00:05:57]-
Paul Warren:
It’s really important. Let’s say you want to become your own brand. How would you go about getting into this?
Jason Barnard:
What do you mean by become your own-
Paul Warren:
What are you doing with your profile here with the knowledge panel? If I wanted to make my own, what steps would you suggest someone that’s trying to become their own brand?
Jason Barnard:
Your own knowledge panel, you mean?
Paul Warren:
Yeah.
Jason Barnard:
Right. Knowledge panels, the thing is that the theory is incredibly simple, and the theory is something I’ve been working on for years, and it’s taken me a long time. It’s one of those things that years of complexity and trying to figure things out and trying all these different things, you end up with the secret sauce, which is actually really simple and it’s not a secret sauce because it’s so simple that I couldn’t keep it secret for very long. It’s basically you say, “I or my brand is an entity. It’s a thing, and it’s a named entity, a thing that Google can understand, and it needs to know which particular one we’re talking about.” So there were 250 Jason Barnards in the world, I want to be sure it understands when we’re talking about this Jason Barnard, it understands that it’s this one and not the podcaster or the footballer or the hockey player or the scholar in San Francisco, I think.
Jason Barnard:
So what you need to do is make sure that you have a home for that entity, and that home is on a site, on a page, in fact. It’s on a page on a site that you control, so your own site. If you don’t have your own personal site, you should have one because, whether you like it or not, you need to control your personal brand or you need some kind of control because it’s going to get increasingly important. It’s not just Google, it’s Facebook, it’s Apple, it’s Bing, it’s all of these, Amazon. They’re all doing the same thing. They’re building knowledge graphs of understanding of the world because that’s how they’re going to be able to serve their clients or their audience.
Jason Barnard:
So you need a home, and you need that home to contain the factual information that’s important about you now and potentially your history, but your history really doesn’t need to be pushed forward because that’s not what they’re interested in. They’re not interested, sorry, that you, Ryan, were in a band or that I was in a band. They’re interested in what we’re doing now because what we’re doing now is what’s important to them to actually make the money. It’s also what’s interesting to people who are looking for us most of the time. If people really want to find about me being in a band, they’ll search for Jason Barnard, The Barking Dogs and they’ll find it because they know I was in that particular band. I think that’s the first important point, is we’re in the present and a lot of us as human beings live in the past, so that’s number one out the window.
Jason Barnard:
Number two, give your entity a home, and it’s a page on your website, preferably not the homepage because the homepage serves lots of other purposes and you don’t want a boring factual homepage. You want it on a page inside your site that says about me or about my brand that Google understands is the source of information from the horse’s mouth, from the entity itself. From there, you then go, “Okay, I’ve got my home. Now, what I need to do” … Google said, “Okay, right, I believe you, let’s say, 20%.” Now, what you need to do is push that confidence in its understanding, i.e., this is true, you need to push it up, and you need to push it up by corroboration. Corroboration is a word that I couldn’t say a year ago, and I’ve been saying it so much, I now manage to say corroboration without sounding like Jonathan Ross, who’s an English show host who’s got a [inaudible 00:09:19] thing. I can’t remember what it’s called.
Jason Barnard:
Anyway, you need to point out to the corroboration that proves what you’re saying is true, which basically means, a., pointing to the reliable sources, all those sources that Google sees as reliable for you, and a source that’s reliable for you isn’t going to be the same as it is for me. That’s what Kalicube does. It figures out what Google sees as reliable, independent, trustworthy corroboration for you as opposed to me.
Ryan Klein:
Yeah, that seems like a pretty good segue because when we talk about ORM, and especially Paul and I and our background, it seems like there’s a whole process for an individual, a whole process for an actual business entity. There’s different access to different social platforms. It can be content contributions. It can be social profiles. There are all these things that an individual has access to and is appropriate for them versus a business and all these other things. But there’s probably still plenty of crossover and even a philosophy that goes into approaching either one. It’s funny, actually, you mentioned the band too. The name of the band I was in was called Karrigan, K-A-R-R-I-G-A-N. I don’t know if that’s a plug for my band from 20 years ago, but-
Jason Barnard:
Ryan, [crosstalk 00:10:32]-
Ryan Klein:
… if you want to listen to our dated pop-rock, feel free. When we were getting going, we were pretty popular. We were supported by things like Bandcamp and Myspace and Total Punk or whatever blogs and stuff.
Jason Barnard:
Wow, cool.
Ryan Klein:
But then there was this really popular game called Counterstrike back in the day, and there was a very popular player in Sweden named Karrigan spelled exactly the same way, and it started to flip in their favor as they got more and more popular and started winning tournaments. Now, if you type in Karrigan, it’s nothing but this Counterstrike player, and you never see anything about the band anymore. It’s interesting how it took over.
Jason Barnard:
Well, that’s actually interesting. There are a couple of things there. Lovely story, but one of them is probabilistic something or other. Dawn Anderson talks about it a lot, and I never really understand 100% what she says. But it’s basically the probability that somebody’s looking for this other person is higher. Therefore, you’re going to see them more. But probabilistic decisions that Google makes about what to show is incredibly geo-sensitive too, so it also depends on where you are in the world what it’s going to show. Another good point is the fact that they were in the news or that person was in the news much more recently and much more solidly than you were, which means it’s more probable once again that somebody’s actually looking for them.
Jason Barnard:
There was an update on the knowledge graph a year and a half ago that I called the Budapest update. What happened is that the average knowledge graph API score, the score it returned, went up fivefold. For some, it went up 1000-fold, and some, it went down 1000-fold. The common denominator for those that rose was that they were in the news recently, and the common denominator for the ones that fell was that they weren’t. Marilyn Monroe and, what was his name, Montgomery Clift was the example I use, is that she’s still famous, she’s still in the news, she’s still talked about day to day. Montgomery Clift isn’t, but he was as famous as she was before, at the time, in the ’50s. Her knowledge graph API score went through the roof, and his went through the floor. It’s the same thing with Homer Simpson and Dan Castellaneta. People talk about Homer Simpson. They don’t talk much about Dan Castellaneta, exactly the same story. So that kind of idea of active present-day usage and newsworthiness, or, sorry, not newsworthiness, how much you’re being mentioned, how much you’re present is going to have a big influence on that.
Paul Warren:
Let’s say as a brand, you wanted to artificially inflate that, right? So you use a PR strategy for press releases. Do you think you can spoof that through those means, or is this legit, actual news that’s what it’s taking into account?
Jason Barnard:
I think you can still trick Google. I started this in the web [inaudible 00:13:35]. You could trick it for years and years and years on end. I think those days of being able to trick it for years on end are over. It’s a race that’s getting faster and faster and more and more difficult to keep up with. But, to sell my own sauce, I would say not spoofing it but you can find which resources Google is looking at for your industry and your geolocation in a more general sense and target those. Kalicube actually gives that information for free. You can go in it and you can see what is Google citing, what is Google talking about, what is Google willing to stick its neck out for in that right-hand channel, right-hand rail, sorry.
Jason Barnard:
So you can say, “Well, I can actually target my PR efforts to the specific platforms and media sites that are important for my industry and my geolocation. Then look at my brand SERP and the stuff that’s already coming up for me and see which ones are being prioritized.” Ooh, I’ve just had another idea. Or look at your competitor and see what their sweet spots are. Copy them. Bingo. You’re away. Thank you. Ooh, I’ve just found a new use for Kalicube. How lovely.
Paul Warren:
Well, we expect to have some royalties from that.
Jason Barnard:
You can have $5.25 next time we see each other.
Paul Warren:
All right. Love it.
Ryan Klein:
That’s all right.
Jason Barnard:
All right.
Ryan Klein:
I want to talk about another aspect of ORM that’s not as transparent as just simply in a SERP, this is where a negative article or a result is positioned or positive or whatever. When it comes to similar searches and it comes to suggested search, there’s a lot of times that brands get associated with negative keywords. So it’ll be a situation where you’re typing in the brand and they’re like, “Wait a second, scam. Is it worth it, or is this legit?” They’re like, “Whoa, these are not things I want associated with my brand.” I’ve tried manipulating that in the past by abusing Mechanical Turk to have people like, “Hey, do this search and then click this result,” and then Amazon’s like, “Nope, nope, nope,” and I got a really great account that I used very much for the past six years banned for that kind of activity.
Ryan Klein:
But it seems that that activity is employed by other people with a degree of success. So when it comes to ORM and staying proactive, you could technically in some ways maybe manipulate a result to associate your brand with positivity consistently. Have you ever had success or taken a look at someone’s name or a similar search or trying to associate it with positivity when people are doing those kinds of searches, or you hope it happens naturally?
Jason Barnard:
Well, the problem you’re having if you’re associated with a negative term is that it’s search volume that’s going to start to affect much more than anything else what Google’s going to be showing [inaudible 00:16:23]. I talked to Nathan Chalmers from Bing, who’s the whole page algorithm guy, and that was phenomenally interesting because the idea … Basically, he’s got … Gary Illyes explained to me how Google ranks all the different rich elements. Basically, you have the blue links that have their ranking, and then you have all these verticals, like videos and images and Twitter, and they all put in a bid, what he calls a bid. It’s not a military bid. It’s a value to the user bid to try and get into the SERP. They get into the SERP if they can provide a better value than the blue link, which is how that SERP develops into a rich SERP. I thought, “Wow, brilliant, wonderful. I’ve nailed it. I’ve understood it all.”
Jason Barnard:
Then I talked to Nathan Chalmers from Bing, who’s the whole page algorithm guy, and he said, “Yeah, but I sit on top of all of that, and I veto anything I feel like, basically.” Obviously, it’s an algorithm. It’s not him personally doing it. So the fact that you get a knowledge panel, the fact that a video should be there but isn’t there is because that algorithm has decided that the other algorithm system of Darwinism, which is what I called it, hasn’t got it right. Interesting enough, Bing, the algorithm for the whole page is called Darwin, which is wonderful.
Paul Warren:
Huh. That’s nice.
Jason Barnard:
That made me giggle a lot because I’d been calling it Darwinism in search, and it’s actually anti-Darwinism because it vetoes, which is wonderful. So, sorry, excuse me. Everything on that page potentially is affected by that whole page algorithm, which steps in and overrides stuff. An example would be that I talked to Ali Alvi from Bing. I did a series of interviews with Bing. Because it’s the same data, the same aim, and the same audience, and the same technology, you can assume they’re not reinventing the wheel. The two function, reasonably, in a similar manner. When talking to John Mueller and Gary Illyes and listening to Martin Splitt, it would seem that they both work the same, more or less the same way.
Jason Barnard:
Ali Alvi, who does the Q&A, which is the featured snippets for Bing, he was saying, sorry, that it’s the same algorithm that runs the descriptions under the blue links, the featured snippet. That’s why it’s called the featured snippet because it’s the snippet under the blue link that’s being featured. He gave me a sly wink and a smile when he said that because I hadn’t realized. He was going, “That’s really obvious, you should’ve thought of that.” Then the knowledge panel, it fills that in. Sorry. What it comes down to is I actually found a really weird thing going on in Bing and I asked Ali Alvi about it and he said, “Well, that’s going to be Nathan overwriting what I sent him.” Obviously, it’s not the people, once again.
Jason Barnard:
So, potentially, what you could do, and this is potentially, is convince that whole page algorithm that those negative associations are not relevant. I would suspect, and this is completely throwing it out there, that the whole page algorithm has a lot of entity-based stuff going on. It needs to understand the entity. I would argue that because it puts those people also asked when it’s understood the entity, it cannot know what questions people ask around an entity without understanding the entity in the first place.
Paul Warren:
So-
Jason Barnard:
And if you look at the questions, it’s about the entity or the topic of the entity.
Paul Warren:
Yeah.
Jason Barnard:
Sorry, excuse me. I do go on, don’t I?
Paul Warren:
No, this is a really interesting topic. So, basically, I guess if I can interpret this correctly, the overall page algorithm is going to set what’s going to happen if whatever rich element isn’t meeting up to the standards.
Jason Barnard:
Exactly.
Paul Warren:
It’s just overwriting all of it, right? So I guess that really means that any search has the potential for rich elements within it.
Jason Barnard:
Oh God, yeah. 100%. Absolutely.
Paul Warren:
Yeah.
Jason Barnard:
It is that thing. It’s basically he has the power of veto and he has the power of bumping something up that wasn’t quite up to scratch. He explicitly said an awful lot of this is based on click-through data. Basically, it’s really sneaky. Google say, “No, we don’t use click data in our algorithm,” because people are saying the blue link algorithm, and they’re saying, “No, we don’t use that,” and they don’t. But it doesn’t mean to say they don’t use it in a whole page algorithm because people aren’t explicitly asking them about the whole page algorithm, which is where it would come into play. It’s user experience on that SERP. It’s making the SERP as relevant and helpful as possible, and they do that using lots of different things, including click-through data-
Paul Warren:
Click-through, yeah.
Jason Barnard:
… which Nathan found was very clearly and explicitly said, “Yes, we do, and that’s a phenomenally important part of the algorithm.”
Paul Warren:
So you could just basically find lots of situations where there isn’t any rich data in a SERP and then influence it, right, like create one?
Jason Barnard:
I call it triggering. Yeah, triggering a rich element.
Paul Warren:
Yeah, trigger it.
Jason Barnard:
People are saying, “Oh, yeah, look where there’s a video box or a featured snippet and then try and do better than the competition.” That’s a lot of effort. Why don’t you find the SERP that should have a video that doesn’t or a featured snippet that doesn’t? Trigger it yourself because that’s what they want. They want to show this information. They just don’t have a candidate that’s sufficiently good quality.
Paul Warren:
So I know, from my own experience, we’ve had blog posts and we’ve created videos to go along with them, and that’s actually forced the video snippet to show up in the SERPs afterwards. But it wasn’t just mine, right? It actually brought in other competitors that were similar for that video because they don’t like to just show one video result in the SERPs. There’s usually a pack of three of them. So we created it, but we actually brought in competitors with us.
Jason Barnard:
Well, I think what’s really important to remember here-
Paul Warren:
Ranking?
Jason Barnard:
… is that the rich elements come into play. Frédéric Dubut … I keep dropping names from Bing, but they gave me a series of five interviews, and it was stunning because they’ve got nothing to lose by sharing all their secrets. Google won’t, but Bing will, so you just ask Bing. Bingo. You’re away. He was saying the fundamental foundation is the blue link algorithm because that’s where they make their money. That’s not going away. Then what you have on top of that is all these other rich elements that come in, and he said the average number of blue links or, sorry, the average number of elements on a page is always going to be about 10. So, basically, these rich elements come in and they replace, they kill a blue link, which is how ORM, if we come back to that … I advise my clients, “You want to get rid of that bad result, don’t drown it, don’t create new content.” Find content below it that you can actually do SEO for somebody else and promote it and leapfrog it above the bad results. But, also, look to trigger these rich elements because these rich elements kill blue links, and that gives you a., more control but also potentially pushes that bad result off the bottom of the page.
Jason Barnard:
So that 10-element rule is actually fairly stable, and I’ve got that in my data. Nathan Chalmers made a really good point, is on an ambiguous query, you’re going to get 12 to 14, maybe 15. On an unambiguous query, you’re going to get five, six. That’s really important. So, for example, yellow door. If my company’s called Yellow Door, who calls their company Yellow Door? It’s a silly idea. It’s so ambiguous. It’s a really long SERP, and it’s very confusing because there is no way for Google or Bing to know what you’re looking for, so they give you the choice. The whole page algorithm will then say, “This is ambiguous. Let’s give them a lot of choice.” So it’s going to create a longer SERP and promote more elements that would not otherwise have got their place. The ambiguity plays a phenomenal role in how the whole page algorithm decides on the length of the SERP. Not only do you need to look at the rich elements, what you can trigger, but also how long the SERP is.
Jason Barnard:
The last point that I’ll make, and then I’ll give you the microphone back, is that with ambiguous queries in particular, it’s going to say, “We need informational, navigational, and commercial queries because we need to be sure that the person has on that page at some place the choice they wanted.” People make the mistake of thinking, “I’m competing for one of 10 places,” let’s say. They’re not. With that kind of query, you’re competing for one of the three informational places. So you’re not competing for one of 10, you’re competing for one of three.
Paul Warren:
Yeah. That’s my whole life, right, is that location-based stuff.
Jason Barnard:
Oh, I’m sorry.
Paul Warren:
I work for a company right now that has 700 locations, so Maps drives about 80% of the revenue for it.
Jason Barnard:
Right.
Paul Warren:
Yeah. I remember when it was 10 back in the day, and then it went down to seven, right, and then it went to three, and then everyone lost their minds.
Jason Barnard:
Whoa.
Paul Warren:
It was just really interesting back then. Yeah, but I think you’ve really given us a lot of great information in this podcast. I know there’s some stuff that I’m going to do differently with my own strategies. I always say we want to get everything that we can possibly get in the SERP, right? So a big Q&A markup, you want to get everything that you can, you want to dominate it. But I’ve never really thought about searching specifically for results that don’t have any of these and making it happen for them, right?
Jason Barnard:
Yeah, and what is, from my perspective, really interesting and I think people don’t really grasp, when I say brand SERP, exact match brand names, SEOs tend to say, “That’s easy. I’m number one. Job finished.” They also say, “It’s not very interesting. I can do that in a month,” which is what I thought when I started, and seven years later, I’m still learning something new every day. All of what I’m, sorry, a lot of what I’m saying comes from just studying brand SERPs because one of the things that strikes me is in order to get the video boxes on my brand SERP or the Twitter boxes, I had to develop a proper content strategy for them. My video strategy is now very good, and my videos are popping up all over the place. To get the Twitter boxes, I had to have a proper Twitter strategy. I have the Twitter boxes, and now I have lots more followers. I’ve got lots of interactions, and Twitter is now a channel [inaudible 00:27:08] for me.
Jason Barnard:
In fact, what happens when you start optimizing your brand SERP in proactive ORM, you can say, “I’m protecting my brand. I’m making sure that the message that’s pushed out to my audience” … And, remember, your audience is actually Google’s users. They’re not your users until they’ve visited your site. So it’s Google’s users, your audience, the subset of Google’s users who are your audience, who are looking at this brand SERP, I want to impress them with great content. I’ve created this content. For that content to rank on my brand SERP, I have to prove to Google that it’s valuable and relevant for them, and to do that, I have to demonstrate or I have to make sure that it is truly valuable and relevant and that Google can see that it is. At that point, I’ve basically just developed a great content strategy.
Ryan Klein:
No, but up to this point, I’ll have to say this has definitely been very insightful. This is something that I’ve always looked at like, “ORM, how do we” … I don’t want to use the word manipulate. Manipulate always have a negative connotation.
Jason Barnard:
Yeah, I agree with you.
Ryan Klein:
But how about this? Influence. Influence is not nearly as bad. I’d always look at it from a negative standpoint because I’m a huge pessimistic. That’s typically the situation we find ourselves in because, as we said before, this is very reactive. You’re very proactive, which is only a million times better. Maybe the podcast should be all the times that people didn’t listen to Jason that should’ve been proactive, is basically what the podcast should be. But it’s interesting because I’ve always thought of the search and the auto-completes, similar searches, as the way that people are continuously searching, but then you think about it and you’re like, “Well, all these things are all on the first page of SERP too. They’re pulling this in from the information that’s associated with the brand on the first page.” So it’s just like, “Oh, shoot. What opportunities do I have to really influence a positive search experience by utilizing some of these results or the ones that I can create, the ones that I have access to and can edit or add to, to include some other keywords to associate with the brand or the individual?”
Jason Barnard:
Ooh, you’re right. That’s actually inspired a couple of points in my brain, one of which is you’re asking about these negative associations. The more we get into entity-based search, the more Google is associating us with specific topics. So strengthening that association, that, basically, by association, you can say, as an entity, once I’m understood as an entity, I can start to influence, as you said earlier on, the associations that Google is making. A good example, and it was really interesting, last weekend, I was building the algorithm for Kalicube and it was all terribly boring, Sunday afternoon struggling my brain around lots of code. I was looking at the list. Basically, Kalicube generates this list of prioritized pages related to my name, what Google is pulling out most often around my name. It struck me, I’ve got a podcast with 159 episodes, and three episodes just kept cropping up, one where I talk to Anton Shulke from SEMrush about webinars, one where I talk to Cindy Krum about her SERP management system, and one where I talked to James Mulvany about podcasts.
Jason Barnard:
It suddenly struck me, why is it picking those three episodes and not any of the other ones? It’s because I’ve done boatloads of webinars, I talk about SERPs all the time, and because I’ve got a podcast and I go on and on and on and on about it. I’ve been doing this experiment with WordLift, which is an entity-based content model. It’s basically saying, “We have an entity, which is a podcast. Within that, we have episodes, which are entities. They each have a guest, which is an entity, and a topic, which is an entity.” We link all that together, and we present it to Google as a knowledge graph, a mini knowledge graph, which is absolutely genius and it’s working really well. It’s a mad experiment, sorry, thanks to Andrea Volpini at WordLift.
Jason Barnard:
But what struck me was that Google’s associating me with those terms, so those are the ones that keep popping up. What you’re talking about, obviously, negative. Positive is a bit more ambiguous and difficult. But that idea is saying it’s associating me with the topics I talk absolutely loads about, so by extension I would suspect that those links at the bottom, those associated terms, can be affected by the quantity of content, quality content, that you create around a specific area and that you could influence it by focusing on these pages that Google sees as important to your entity. Once again, it goes beyond industry and geo. It goes to you personally, this entity, what’s important, and placing on those sources the things that you want Google to associate with you more than the ones that it’s currently showing. That would be a really interesting experiment to do.
Ryan Klein:
Yeah. That’s a good point. The more that we talk about, the more that brain is going to the next place, but we only have so much time, of course. Now, you’re talking about the quantity, and so it goes beyond the first page. It could be multiple instances on multiple pages that are getting aggregated, and then it’s almost being quantified and prioritized.
Jason Barnard:
Yeah. Another thing, I’m building a tool. I’m working for Yoast to work on their brand SERP and their knowledge panels because they see that it’s important, which is lovely. I’ve started to build out the tool based on a testing set of about 15 entities, including Yoast and WordLift and SE Ranking, who I work with as well on this, and myself and the entities around me and so on and so forth. What I’ve seen is there’s a phenomenal difference in the amount or the number of pages that crop up in the system and the relative strength of some compared to others and the relative weightings. What I’m starting to see is that types of pages, about pages, profile pages, articles about, articles by, spam, rubbish, negative, unhelpful content, the volumes for each entity are very different, and there’s going to be a pattern. I just need to find what that pattern is.
Jason Barnard:
So you’re looking at what is relevant and where are the holes? Are you missing profile pages? Are you missing about me pages? Are you missing articles about you? Obviously, you’re not missing spam. Are you missing mentions? All of these need to be filled up because Google’s trying to fill up its SERPs about an entity with a representative set of URLs, of content, and it’s trying to do a balanced representation. If you think about it from that point of view, the influencing of it becomes, I think, more approachable.
Paul Warren:
I think you’ve covered a lot of great stuff, and it’s a lot to think about and a lot to pull out from this. It sounds like you’re really on the cutting edge of doing a lot of data analysis on the SERPs, which is great to hear from people that do that all the time.
Jason Barnard:
Well, there are a few things that struck me. The last couple of weeks have been actually … I keep having these exciting periods. All my articles in Wikipedia got deleted in the space of two weeks, which deeply hurt my ego but taught me an awful lot because it was an experience in rebuilding, which was really interesting and I learned absolutely boatloads about how to build a knowledge panel without Wikipedia or Wikidata, for that matter. The last couple of weeks has been building out this machine that’s trying to understand what Google prioritizes for each individual entity, whereas before I only had it by industry and by geo. It’s bringing up an awful lot of stuff that I really hadn’t thought about.
Jason Barnard:
Remember, I’ve been thinking about this for seven years and thinking about pretty much only this. It was something I thought initially would take me two months and I would get bored of and go and do something else, and everybody I talked to says, “Yeah, this is really easy. That’s a month’s work and we’re away.” Seven years later, I’m still learning loads, and I think the depth of this is astonishing. I can’t get over it. The cutting edge kind of idea, what’s interesting is it’s so simple, so obvious, and we should’ve been doing this for years, so it’s not cutting edge. It’s niche because nobody else is doing it except me, or very few people. As far as I know, nobody else is doing it, and yet it’s universal. So it’s a niche that’s universal, which is ironic as well.
Jason Barnard:
Thirdly, when I was talking to Cindy Krum about … She’s got a developer, and I keep talking to people who’ve got developers. It isn’t easy going through that stage for two reasons, one of which is the developer isn’t always on the same wavelength. Secondly, you don’t actually know what you’re looking for until you find it. I’m my own developer. I’ve got this minuscule database with 10 million lines of 10 million brand SERPs in it, and I can search through it and look through it and keep sorting it in different ways until the cows come home. That’s where I make all the great discoveries because I’m going through it and thinking, “Oh, what does that mean? Where does that go?” It’s all these rabbit holes. But because I’m developing … I’m a Sunday afternoon developer, basically. I’m rubbish. But it works. It sticks together. It doesn’t fall apart.
Jason Barnard:
But the great advantage is that I can do it all very fast, and I can learn [inaudible 00:36:53] because every time I see something new, I can realize that my initial thought, which if I had the developer I would’ve pushed them down that because, obviously, that’s where we’re going and that’s the decision of the company or the bus or whatever you want to say, is saying, “Actually, I can” … It’s very agile. It’s agile development of a tool that’s moving in ways that I hadn’t expected because I’m coding it myself and from this seven years of research. I’m talking to you guys. I’m going on a little bit about it. But my brain hurts. Two weeks of this and my brain is going, “Wow, wow, wow, wow,” pretty much every minute of the day.
Ryan Klein:
Just in this conversation, which has been going for only about 40 minutes, my brain has jumped two or three times, so I can’t even imagine what kind of headaches you get.
Jason Barnard:
Yeah, I’m not sleeping very well, basically.
Paul Warren:
All right. Well, thanks so much for being on the show, Jason. Where can people get a hold of you at?
Jason Barnard:
Well, best way is searching my name, Jason Barnard, and you’ll find all the information you want on my brand SERP.
Paul Warren:
Definitely.
Ryan Klein:
Do they have to associate-
Paul Warren:
What a great plug.
Ryan Klein:
I’m sorry, yeah, but do they have to associate … Do they have to type in motor head? Do they have to type in double bass? Or can they type in ORM, SEO, all those kinds of things? Or is it just straight-up your name?
Jason Barnard:
It’s straight-up my name. There are 250 Jason Barnards in the world, and none of them get a look in, poor chaps. So Jason Barnard, it’s actually just me, which is kind of … Part of the thing is the probability that somebody’s searching for Jason Barnard the podcaster in the UK, Jason Barnard the footballer who’s quite famous in South Africa is actually much higher than the fact that they’re searching for me in those countries, and yet I’m still the only person on the brand SERP. Why? Because Google is so phenomenally confident that it’s understood. So it’s going, “Ooh, easy option. Jason Barnard, understood this one. There you go, guys. Everybody’s happy.” Search my name. You should only see me. Not should in inverted commas, not in the sense that that’s all I want you to see. That’s kind of interesting from the point of view, is the brand SERP is not only what’s most relevant for the user but what also Google is most confident in.
Paul Warren:
Have you ever thought about tweeting at Jason Barnard the footballer and talking shit to him because your name ranks and his doesn’t?
Jason Barnard:
Actually, the podcast host, he does a music podcast in the UK, Jason Barnard, The Strange Brew. He’s actually a really, really nice guy. I tweeted him and we’ve had a tweet conversation, and he’s really cool about it. He’s really, really nice about it.
Paul Warren:
That’s good.
Ryan Klein:
That’s interesting. One last note from me, and I swear I won’t chime in for anything anymore, but people pay for domains and the position that domains get. I can imagine that there’d be a landscape where people would pay for the work that you’ve done positioning a name, if that would even make sense. I don’t know. That’s interesting.
Jason Barnard:
That’s true. Ooh, Lord. Oh, no. You’ve started a whole new rabbit hole.
Ryan Klein:
I didn’t mean to, I swear.
Paul Warren:
No.
Ryan Klein:
Nope. Just erase that from your memory. I didn’t say anything.
Paul Warren:
You’re just going to start buying all the name domains, and that’s what’s going to happen. We can see it.
Jason Barnard:
Brilliant. Anyway, connect with me on Twitter, @jasonmbarnard. I love Twitter. I think Twitter’s a lot of fun. LinkedIn I like because there’s a lot of good stuff going on on LinkedIn. It’s more informative. Twitter’s more informal and fun, so it depends on what your attitude is. Come along to kalicube.pro and have a look at the platform. Search my name if you feel like it, and that’s it. I’m really, really happy to talk to people and discuss brand SERPs. If you want to talk about traditional SEO, probably go and talk to somebody else.
Paul Warren:
All right. Well, thank you. Jason Barnard, everyone. Thank you so much for being on.
Jason Barnard:
Thanks a lot, guys. That was brilliant.