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In the pub, just before the second day of the Takeitoffline unconference. Barry hates AMP and is an attempt by Google to force the web to conform to their vision of the web. Now they are getting involved in WordPress, and we should be very worried (especially when we get words like PWAMP). A commercial company should not be the organisation that decides how the web works – because they will do what is best for their bottom line, not what is best for the web. Google is an advertising company with 90% dominance and should be regulated. They started wanting to make the web a better place, but are now a company looking to make money. We dig into how the European Directive may pan out for news sites. Although they are playing hardball on the EU directive, and the recent updates have impacted the publishers enormously (and cost them dearly), Google are trying to be more political with the publishers. Then onto what business models might work for news publishers – not a one-size-fits-all. I vaguely float the idea of calling him Happy Barry. Then onto Google breaking the Social Contract, and the ins-and-outs of permission to scrape. Conclusion – Barry chirpily says that Google don’t feel they owe anyone anything.

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We discuss pest control, cartoons, and eventually get onto how to get great online reviews for an offline business. It’s all about relationships. Oh, and asking nicely. Bribing people doesn’t work. Top 3 platforms are Google, Yelp and Facebook

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For once someone gets all over excited about brand SERPs. I manage to keep reasonably quiet and let him talk, despite the fact I am over excited about it too. He actually does proper audits on all terms that contain the brand name, and gives some super duper insights we should all be taking note of. So go out and manage your branded searches. Easy win, and vitally important.

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Google don’t look at author. They look at entities. Google don’t look at accuracy of facts. Kristine uses Omegas as an example as to why. Then why linking out is so important. I expound my topic layer theory. They don’t use NLP, they use NLU. Which is why we need Schema.org… and we end up with a sulky robot on crutches

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Both findability and discoverability = matching user intent with information or content that they want. Quickly. On and offline. Grocery stores, for example. We end up trying (and succeed) to shoehorn the idea into punk music and Dada movement.

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Google, Bing and Amazon have a user-centric design perspective, and we tend to forget that. We should pull and analyse the data to discover the real pain points of our potential clients rather than use our instincts since we are all biased, and our content will therefore be biased.

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Fabrice us downloading the whole worldwide web every day (even my site). Bing have launched a crawling API, and that is putting Fabrice out of a job (and he wants to be out of a job) – simply ping Bing to have an URl crawled immediately. They also have solved Javascript.

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I have to read her name tag to get through the difficult first moments of the podcast. Then we talk about the health industry and getting old (it is expensive). Plus the target audience is not necessarily the people themselves, but their children. And if the audience is the older people, Bing is a good marketing target. She goes on to say that if you do the right thing, Google updates are not a worry, and you sleep well.

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Craig explains that I have got the strategy for my podcast all wrong. My plan is to not have a plan, which is not a good idea, it seems. So he tells me what I SHOULD be doing. Hint – have a plan.

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Majestic don’t keep Dixon informed about very much. Because he can’t keep a secret. When they DID tell him what they have been doing for the last year and a half,., he got rather enthusiastic – context around links by analysing around chunks / blocks / segments / sections / fraggles of content… and so scoring content according the context of the segment it is in… text, semantics, link density, images, alt tags and so on. Cool! The fact that Majestic are doing this (and looking at how well they do it) gives us a good indication of how well Google will (probably) doing. Then onto the new link tags, the problems inherent in the UGC tag… And Dixon suggests that Google add a rel=important tag. Dixon digs his grave by suggesting that Google lack variety and are moving to echo chambers… and somehow uses Middle Ages Villages to demonstrate. I get excited about self-fulfilling prophecies and the problems of discoverability and trust for some authoritative content … The World’s best content is the very stuff that is buried.