How schema markup establishes trust and boosts information gain

Schema markup is a form of structured data that helps search engines understand the content on a webpage more efficiently. It benefits Google by reducing the costs associated with crawling and indexing web pages, especially in the context of spam growth and the adoption of generative AI in SERPs. For website owners, schema markup can improve visibility and reduce the likelihood of being deindexed. It can also increase the chances of inclusion in Search Generative Experience (SGE) and boost information gain scores, which are important for visibility in conversational search environments.

To build trust with Google using schema markup, you can:

• Implement detailed schema markup that accurately defines the entities on your page and their relationships.
• Link entities using the @id property to enhance the description of their relationships.
• Connect to external data with the sameAs property to increase the descriptiveness of the entity and prove its legitimacy. This involves linking entities to trusted and verified data sources such as Wikidata, Google's Knowledge Graph, and others. By minimizing ambiguity, this allows Google to easily verify and trust your content.

Information gain scores are used by Google to improve user experience by encouraging the discovery of new information with each query. In the context of SGE, which operates in a conversational search environment, a high information gain score could boost a website's content chances of being included in SGE results. This is because there is less competition for the inclusion of that information in Google's machine learning algorithms. To increase these scores, it's important to combine fresh, unique content with schema markup.

SEO professionals can prevent deindexing by Google by:

• Implementing schema markup to help Google's crawlers and algorithms understand web content more efficiently, which can be a cost-saving measure for Google.
• Linking entities within their content using the @id property and connecting these to external data sources with sameAs to establish trust.
• Providing unique and verifiable content that adds value and is not duplicated, to ensure it is worthy of inclusion in Google's index and SGE.