Episode 6: How to Help Google/Amazon Make Sense of a Chaotic, Unstructured Web
Episode 6: How to Help Google/Amazon Make Sense of a Chaotic, Unstructured Web
Google’s mission has always been to organise the world’s information. Amazon’s mission is to be the most customer-centric company on earth. In 2018, both were racing to be the dominant answer engine - but they were approaching the problem from fundamentally different directions. Google answers questions. Amazon completes actions. Episode 6 of the #SEOisAEO series examined what that difference means for brands trying to be found, understood, and recommended by both.
Arnout Hellemans, Martha Van Berkel, and Aaron Bradley joined Jason Barnard to tackle the coordination problem that sits underneath both platforms: the web is a mess. It’s contradictory, inconsistent, and largely unstructured. The same brand might be described differently on its own website, its Wikipedia entry, its Google Business Profile, its Wikidata record, and fifty other sources. Each of those contradictions is a signal of uncertainty for the algorithm. Algorithms don’t recommend things they’re uncertain about.
The practical framing the episode developed was about helping the machine, not gaming it. A brand that explicitly defines its entity - who it is, what it does, where it operates, who founded it, what it’s related to - in structured, machine-readable language is doing the algorithm’s job for it. The algorithm’s incentive is to use that information, because it’s cleaner and more reliable than anything it can extract by crawling unstructured prose.
Martha Van Berkel’s contribution focused on Schema.org as the shared vocabulary that makes this possible: a standardised language that any algorithm - Google, Amazon, Bing, Apple, or the next platform - can read. Aaron Bradley brought the broader structured data ecosystem into view, including how Linked Data principles connect entity definitions across the web into a coherent graph that algorithms can traverse. Arnout Hellemans grounded the conversation in practical site architecture, where the decisions developers make about how to structure content either help or hinder the machine’s ability to extract meaning.
The presentation deck used during this episode of the #SEOisAEO series is preserved on SlideShare. How to Help Google/Amazon Make Sense of a Chaotic, Unstructured Web
The through-line is the same one running through the entire series: a brand that makes itself easy to understand gets understood. A brand that leaves the interpretation to the algorithm gets interpreted - and the algorithm will use whatever it finds, accurate or not.
Published by: Semrush. Host: Jason Barnard. Guests: Arnout Hellemans, Martha Van Berkel, Aaron Bradley. October 09, 2018
