Good Day Google+ (Episode 3)

Hi, and welcome to this week's edition of Good Day Google+. I'm Chef Dennis, and thank you for stopping by today for our show. I have some great guests on for today, and I'd like to introduce them. Moving across from me, we have Craig Fifield. Is that how you pronounce that, Craig? Did I do that right?

Yep, Fifield.

Fifield, okay. And he's going to talk about WordPress and some other things he does. And we have Dr. Jean Layton, and she is gluten-free. Hi, Jean.

Hello.

Okay, and Michael Bennett, who does the Friday Drive, which has also been on Saturdays now too, hasn't it, Michael?

Yeah, you know, change it up, gotta keep it fresh, right?

Okay, great. So here's the deal, everybody's gonna talk a little bit about what they do, and we're gonna ask each other questions and interact and engage. And you have questions, leave them in the comment bar and we will do our best to get to them. We do have the comment tracker on in here, so we'll see what you ask when you ask. So have fun. Enjoy the show, ask your questions, and, uh, we're gonna have a good time today. So thanks a lot, and I'm gonna turn it right over to Craig. Craig, how you doing?

Not bad. Um, I guess I should start with a little bit of my background.

Yeah, that sounds good.

I started, uh, doing web marketing back in the very end of 1995, so I've been in the space for almost 17 years or whatever the math is there. I had started my own web design business back then, quickly realized that I didn't like hearing about, you know, people's favorite colors and the hassles of design, so I quickly switched to web marketing, which at the time nothing really existed. We were doing SEO before SEO really had a name. And quickly after I started doing that, I got hired at a startup. Where we developed web marketing apps for SEO, affiliate marketing, email marketing. And that was such a success, we ended up getting bought out by Microsoft. So then I worked for Microsoft for 10 years developing more of the same, more web apps, some small business apps. And now, I think it was 2007 I left, and I'm on my own again. Doing a lot of SEO and SMO consulting, and most of that I do on WordPress, which is, you know, a popular and easy-to-use platform, probably my favorite. That's pretty much it.

Now, Craig, the one thing that really brought you to my attention was the, the post you had done on authorship and the plugin. Now, was that— or you were just explaining how to use the Yoast plugin to do it? That wasn't your plugin, or was it?

It's not my plugin, but I'm actually about to release my own that will just— there's sort of a gap in what people can do with the existing plugins or the existing hacks. So I have a plugin coming out that will do that, that will provide some additional functionality that doesn't exist now. But the post was just to try and get people to utilize authorship the correct way based on some new guidelines that Google had released.— or not even new, but they made it more clear where you should have authorship and where you shouldn't. So I wrote a couple posts explaining different ways to achieve that. And then I'll follow up with the plugin that I should release in a couple weeks.

What were the basic things of where you should do and what you should do for authorship?

So basically, I think a lot of people, myself included, when authorship first came out and even Rail Publisher, you just took the code and kind of stuck it in your header, and it went site-wide across your site. And that's actually not correct. What Google is looking for is to have authorship only on pages that you wrote or that would have a byline. So if you think of it like a magazine, every article has by Craig Fifield or by Chef Dennis Littley. Those types of pieces of content, that's where you want to have authorship. But where you don't want to have it is like your contact pages and your homepage and things like your archive pages where it's just a list of your articles. You want it just on the specific articles themselves or posts. And like I was saying, a lot of people had that set up incorrectly, just thinking it wasn't going to be a big deal. But since Google clarified it, I thought it was important to to help people get on the right page.

How can that hurt you, having them on the other pages?

Right now, I don't think it will. But they potentially— you know, they even highlighted people using it for product descriptions and e-commerce catalogs. That could be used to spam, almost. So your product listing can show up in Google Search, and it could have a little face beside it that's going to get you some additional click-throughs. So there are people doing that type of thing. If you're just the average blogger, I don't think you need to sweat it too much. But you never want to leave it in the hands of the judges. So in the case of Google, you just want to have all your ducks in a row so that— their algorithm is one of the greatest ever, but it also does get confused. And you don't want to risk that. Good.

Good to know. Thank you, Craig.

All right.

Now we're moving on over to Jean Layton. Jean, you tell us a little about yourself and what you do.

Sure, I'm Dr. Jean Layton. I'm a naturopathic physician and started writing a blog 7 years ago. At that point, it was called Gluten Free Organics. That's my hope. Not always easy to find, so I rebranded to Just Gluten Free Doctor about 3 years ago. Working on WordPress, I used to work on Blogger. And I use the blog to both archive my recipes and to educate. And so I've kind of come over to Google+ using this fabulous new tool to make it easier for people to get educated about how, why, where, when, um, a gluten-free diet might be the most appropriate choice for their health. And I've been Just this past couple months working with Bob's Red Mill to do Hangouts on Air, talking with bloggers and bringing in recipes and information about the Grains of Discovery line of grains that they have, most of which are gluten-free, and it's been a lot of fun. I'm enjoying this. I have one other set of interviews I've been doing with book authors because when you've been writing for 7 years, people want you to review their book. And there's only so much I can write about a particular book, but it is so much fun to talk to the person who wrote it. So that's what I've moved to. It's called A Look at Books, and that's my other series. So I'm enjoying Google+ because I can play more here.

Now you were a convert to Google+. You weren't on right away, or you were but you hadn't really embraced it, and you really have. Embraced it.

Well, I got on early and then I had some pretty horrendous tech problems and I could not open Hangouts for, I want to say, 4 months.

That was just recently, wasn't it? That was a few months ago.

It was close to the beginning of the year. I don't know what happened. I work on a Mac and I don't honestly know exactly what happened. I was able to use them and then all of a sudden it shut me down and I had to start the investigation of what, where, who, how, working through all the support boards and everything else and I finally had somebody say it's this file and get that file off your computer and you're going to be good.

Poof!

That was it, one file.

Yeah, one file. It was months of looking for it.

Who finally gave you that piece of advice?

It was somebody in one of the support boards who actually is not active on Google+ as far as I can tell. I've tried to follow him and unless he's using a different name, which of course is possible, he's not here. The funniest thing was I had everybody attempting to help me. I had Ronnie Binzer, the referring me on to people deep in Google and they couldn't figure it out. And when I finally got the information from this gentleman, he said, you know, and I sent it back through the Google people, they were all like, oh yeah, I forgot about that one. It's like, eee! That kind of thing. But yeah, I'm here, I'm having a great time with this. I think it's a fabulous way to give people a lot of information briefly.

Absolutely.

You should write a post on Google+ about what that file was.

I, you know, I thought about that, and the problem I have is I have a very focused niche blog. I write about gluten-free cooking and computer files. It's like I need a second page on my blog because I am a geeky person who loves all this tech, and I'm happy to, you know, I think I reshared when you When you wrote your article, Craig, about the rel="author," I reshared it on every one of the food blogger places that I'm a participant in because they're the people who really need to be able to claim their work. We've got so many people who rip off our work that being able to say, "Nope, even Google knows this is mine," it's so important. But it really doesn't fit the niche of somebody who's looking for gluten-free sourdough bread.

Right, but what about just posting it as a Google+ post and not to your blog?

You know, I've moved a lot of stuff out into Google+, but then the other side of it— and I appreciate Google+ tremendously— but the other side of it is if I'm giving out that much information, I want to document it somewhere where it's housed and protected and exists off of a temporary platform.

Yep.

Wouldn't you still have some type of ownership of it if you set it up as a regular post on Google+?

You do to an extent, but the point with that is if you're sharing valuable content, Google could change directions in an instant and you could lose any of that content. So you do have to be a little bit cautious of what you don't own yourself.

Good point. Good to know.

Greg, I've got to talk to you at some point because I have this dichotomy in my brain and it needs to exist on my blog.

Yeah, yeah, I know your feeling.

Well, Jean, you can ask the questions here if we have time. It's probably things that a lot of us would want to know if we move on to that. Let me turn it over to Michael Bennett. If you guys have not seen the Drive, it's something you need to pay attention to. Michael, why don't you tell us a little bit about what you do?

Well, I'm actually in aerospace metal distribution, which doesn't really exist in terms of social. There's no metals— there's not a lot of real metals people in social. So I figured if I'm going to take my time, it's going to be invested into a network that will allow the payout to come eventually, because you can't go on Twitter, you can't go on Facebook and engage the same way as you can here. People really do communicate. They help you. They are interested in how you are progressing. They want to see you potentially do better if you come up with a couple unique ways of doing things, which is kind of what I've done with the Google Drive presentations. I was able to start engaging with a few top influencers here and take their content and put it into a Google Drive presentation, which enabled the content to get repurposed. It's a It's just like taking a Coke can and putting a new label on it. And it's just, you know, when they want to resurface this amazing stuff, it's a great way to do it. So I started communicating with them. They would give me potentially an index of their posts and their content. And I would take that and I'd put it in Drive in a presentation, which can actually be shared directly into a Google+ post. So you can actively use the presentation inside the post itself. There's one main problem with that. There's a problem with that, and that is it doesn't display the entire cover slide. I was finding that some of these Drive posts were not getting the type of engagement that they should. When I started this, I didn't want to say, "Okay, I'm going to point you right to my blog." Again, my blog doesn't do me any good. It is connected to my business, but it's really only Google+ stuff. I don't have any AdSense on there. I'm not getting financially compensated for this blog. I'm not getting compensated for any of the stuff we do on Drive. It's all just me trying to help and create a niche for myself. I found a way to basically start putting nice-looking pictures up and then putting my link in there. The engagement has really skyrocketed. I didn't want to be that guy in the beginning saying, oh, you don't know who I am, just click on my blog post. I wanted to put the drive into a Google+ post so it was unique and fresh to the platform because you're using the platform for what it's worth, which is displaying a live presentation in the post. But that wasn't getting the engagement after a while, and then I switched to the photographs, and now it's where it should be. These drive decks are just fantastic. Fantastic. I mean, you know, there's a way for you to go and find, you know, a ton of content in one spot. And you can watch videos, you can click on web pages. I mean, it's really dynamic, and it's accessible from any device, and it's really opened up my network here. So I really enjoy it. I love Google+, and I'm having a great time, you know, hanging out with people and meeting a lot of great really, really smart people. So that's kind of a little bit about the drive.

Where are you getting the content from? Is this from other people in your industry, or are you talking about just content you're finding on Google+?

I was on Twitter for a couple years, and I wasn't doing it right. And then in February of this year, I kind of dug deep and figured out how to really craft a really perfect tweet, let's say. And then as of March 1, I made the transition over here. Because I was seeing a lot of different— I was seeing much different growth here versus Twitter. And, you know, to your question is I curated a ton of information on Twitter, and then I came over here and began writing a blog and doing that stuff. But to get the content, I would contact the person with whom I wanted to put into Drive, into a presentation, and I would either say, hey, I want to take This stuff, I think I started with Josh Byrd's June SEO analysis. That thing is 25 different articles that he curated. I said, "Hey, I'm going to put this into Drive." He was one of my first ones. I think at that time I probably had a couple thousand followers. It's not like he was jumping through hoops to say, "Oh yeah, do that for me. It's awesome. You're great." I took it.

It worked.

Then I did a couple for Dennis Littley. Sometimes, like Dennis Littley, he'll post these massive lists that are 50 links, and it's overwhelming for most people. You see these lists, and you're scrolling, and you're scrolling, and you're scrolling, and you're like, "Oh my God, this is amazing, but how can I wrap my head around something like this?" I mean, if I watch one Hangout, that's an hour. There's 15 Hangouts here. 15 hours to watch all this stuff. For instance, Chef Dennis had his Live Bloggers event. That was another one that I did a few months ago where I think it was like 12 HOAs that— again, that's 12 hours of amazing content. I said, "I'd love to put this into Drive." You take the YouTube link, put it into a slide, and then you can watch that video from anywhere.. And you don't have to worry about where to go to find it, or, you know, if you need to access it quickly, it's like a couple clicks and you're right there. You're not searching around for all this stuff, and it's all housed in one central location. Cool. So it's all from— a lot of it's from the producers of the content. Right.

Is this in order to build your personal brand, or is this helping you at Michelin?

I'm taking, you know, I work closely with a couple friends on here who I met, Stefan Obnanian and Jesse Widillo, and we've kind of coined it the Michelin approach where I'm doing it very much to personally brand myself in hopes that just like Google says, Google wants an individual. They're not giving a business page authorship per se. They want the individual to create the article, you get the article authority from that. So just like that, if I can develop myself personally, then the relationships that I could potentially create later are going to be a lot more sound. And I'm not pitching anything to anybody, I'm not selling anything to anybody, I'm not pushing myself on people and saying, here you go, if I can help you, God bless. If you don't need help, hey, that's cool too. If you don't want help, whatever. But It's the backend approach. It's the long-term approach where if I can build myself and they can trust me, then eventually they're going to start to follow Michelin and they're going to take interest in what I have to do in the real world, which is a long approach. But if you can get indexed in search by developing your profile and getting a higher PageRank and then the posts you put up can be indexed, I mean, that's invaluable. So, you know, you can't— not every post is indexed. You can't just put a post up and all of a sudden you're going to pop up to the first page of Google. It doesn't work like that. So unless you have a high PageRank on your profile, which you can't get unless you have to do a personally developed brand, you know, takes time. So if you have that, you can achieve that, then eventually what you do post could potentially be indexed that much faster, and that will draw eyes to my business eventually.

So cool, I like that approach.

It's a good philosophy to take. Yeah, absolutely. And you know, a lot of it, what you're saying about coming out and doing things in a different light and people finding you and then associating that with you and your company is what I tell food bloggers bloggers all the time, you know, leave your comfort zone, stop just talking to food bloggers, talk to other people because eventually they're going to see, oh, they run a food blog, I eat every day, hmm, you know, we put these two together, you know, everybody eats so we have something that everybody wants. So you know, you go out and make new friends and play nice in the rest of this big sandbox we have.

Great.

We have a couple of questions, I'm going to pop them up right now and— Karen asks, she goes, she has a contributor post on another blog. How can I add my authorship to the other blog? Can I embed something behind the scenes in the post HTML?

Yep. For sure. So usually there's an author bio section. And from there, they'll either link to your website or they can link to your Google+ profile. And if they append the rel="author" attribute to that link and link to your Google+ post, you'll get the authorship for that post, as long as they don't already have it set up for themselves. Does that make sense?

Is there something you need to do to tell them then, or to—

No, I mean, you could complain to them if they're trying to take the authorship credit. But usually, most respectable blogs should have it set up. Where you can just embed that link in your bio section and get the author credit. But keep in mind, it is still— authorship is still a new thing. So you could encounter the situation where they have it set up site-wide, and it's not quite going to work. But most blogs should be getting on the— fixing that. Or yeah, most blogs should be on the path to have that set up right.

Okay, great. Would you encourage people to have a bio on their site with the rel="author" in it that you would then send as your bio link to wherever you're guest posting to try and make it easy for the host?

Not sure I follow that.

Um, if I maintain a bio page on my blog with rel="author="me," because it's on my site. And if I'm guest posting for somebody else, if I then say, use this bio, would that, having the rel="author=" in it, have it refer back to me adequately? Because I have stuff out there on the web from well before rel="author=" existed. And to go back to all these older places and say, here, I need you to add this bit of code. Most of them aren't going to have time.

Yeah. If they're already linking to you in some form, I wouldn't worry about it. But if there are key large sites or really popular sites that you have articles on, they would probably be worth contacting directly and saying, hey, can you update this?

OK. Hey, Craig. So you were mentioning something earlier not to put the authorship potentially in a footer or header or something like that. It was sounding like it's obviously regarding blogs specifically, but obviously the coalescence of blogs and websites have kind of permeated and are now one thing. So there's really not much difference per se between a blog and a web page. But in my instance, I have a web page that I built. And I have my authorship, my link in my footer to my Google+ page. I authored every one of those pages. They're all mine. Yes, I have it on my— obviously it's on my homepage. I don't have any archives or anything like that. But individually to go in and obviously take it out of the footer and then go put it back into each page individually, does that really— does that make sense? Should I do that? Because I built it. It's all mine. It's all my content and stuff like that as well.

Right. So you still want it— I like to put it in the header just so that I don't have to worry about— so I move from— I end up running quite a lot of sites on WordPress. And what I get afraid of, even with clients, is maybe they'll change their byline, which is the rel="author" link when it's within the post. So maybe they'll change their name, and that can screw up rel="author." Or maybe they just won't like the byline at all. There was a long time where I didn't I don't put my byline there because why should I have a byline? You're on CraigByfield.com. You know, I could just take that right out. So it sounds like by having it in your footer, the way that is, that sounds a lot like a byline approach. So if you have it up in the header, that, you know, you get the full credit without having to worry about changing the actual page.

Okay, so there's a difference then between the header and the footer in terms of potential ramifications? I mean, it's not— I don't think that obviously is going to be hard to change. I mean, I cut it out of the footer, paste it into the header, I guess.

Yep. So no, if you already have it set up, I think that's just fine. There's just different ways it can be applied. So you can do it the byline way, or you can do it the header way. I just prefer the header way because it's a little more permanent, you know, so that you might not mess things up. But you mentioned having it on your home page, and technically Unless your homepage reads like an article, it shouldn't be on your homepage.

OK, well, obviously if it's in my footer, you know, it's kind of—

Right, it's going sitewide. Sitewide, right. So, um—

Yeah, if that site— That's kind of my concern.

If that site is important to you, I would look at implementing it the right way to— so don't have it on your contact pages, and don't have it on the homepage, and that type of thing.

All right, so then it's going to probably take me taking the link out of the footer and then just going in and individually putting it onto every page?

Probably, yeah. Is this just an HTML site that you built?

Yeah, yeah. I mean, but I built out 100 landing pages for it, so—

Yeah, well, you can get pretty creative with search and replace. OK. And you might find that you can separate out the post pages and just do a quick search and replace on one of the tags in the header, like the close head tag. Uh-huh. You follow me there?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And insert your link.— you know, in an instant.

Okay. Alright, we'll definitely look into that for sure. Thank you.

You're welcome. It's all kind of a pain in the neck right now.

Yeah.

Well, that was a little over me anyway, so let's move on to the next question. Where'd it go here? Okay, Susan Sarah, she's confused. So if I'm writing on my own blog and Google already recognizes me for authorship right now, I still have to add this code to every single blog post and add a byline as well?

Yeah, so Google right now is— they have a good algorithm to detect authorship. But this comes back to you don't want to let them try and figure it out. You want to prove it to them. So the more explicit you can be with your author link, the better.

But the post you wrote on authorship, if they use that—— that, I mean, you don't have to go to each individual themselves. If you just use that, that puts them to your post, doesn't it?

Absolutely, but it's just everyone has their blog set up in a different way. So if you're not— one of my posts was about WordPress SEO. If you're not using that, you might be using Jetpack, which also does it, or you might be using another authorship plugin, or you may have even just have it in your bio, you know, site-wide. There's just a lot of different approaches. But you should take an approach to where you can be very explicit instead of letting Google try to figure it out.

OK. And here was a comment from Kenneth. And he said, wait, Dennis Littley has some great posts? Yeah, definitely, Kenneth. Check him out. He does have some great posts.

Maybe he has some— He's quite the curator. —a sarcasm button. So that you know, obviously you can say, you know, obviously I'm being sarcastic because I find it a little hard to believe that Kenneth isn't obviously fully on board with that.

That's hysterical. Kenneth just posted— oh, what did I do? I clicked on the link. Excuse me, I just disappeared for a moment. I clicked on the wrong thing. Kenneth just posted a link for Karen. So everyone can see. You can go to support@google.com. And it's in there on the comments. You can take a look at it. All right, let's move on to another— this is what Karen had asked. Is there a way to verify the authorship?

Yeah, so if you view the source, you can look within the source. You just look for your profile. URL. But the easiest thing is to use Google's Rich Snippet testing tool, or the structured data testing tool is what they call it now. If you just search for structured data test tool, it'll come right up.

Sounds good. Gene, I want to turn back to you for a few minutes and ask you a little bit of questions about the evil white flower and talk a little bit more about the good grains. I mean, I know it's— We have so many things that we're coming down with, and so many ailments, and aches, and pains that are getting attributed back to white flour. It's something people ask me all the time. I'm not a gluten-free blogger, so I always refer them to other people like yourself that know what they're doing, because I don't want to mislead them. If you could tell us a little bit about— I know you said you stumbled on it. I remember in the one we did earlier in the year for my seminar, my conference, you talked about you became an accidental gluten-free blogger almost because your children teach you that you have these conditions?

Well, what happened in my family is my husband broke his leg ice skating with the kids in a local rink. You're not supposed to break your leg falling on ice. We discovered he had osteoporosis. That's not common in men at all. So lots of research— why would he not be absorbing calcium is really what it came down to. And combining that with the research on his family history, we came up with celiac disease. Now, the diagnostics for celiac disease at that point were blood work followed by a small intestinal biopsy. Our insurance wouldn't cover it, so what we did was we looked at, okay, well, what would you do if you were able to diagnose that way? And what would you— you know, is there any way for us to try the solution? And the reality is, even if you go through all the diagnostics, the next step is a gluten-free diet trial. And then you challenge. You eat gluten for a day and see what your body does. So we looked at that situation and said, okay, um, insurance isn't going to cover this biopsy, which was at that point we were getting quotes anywhere between $3,000 and $3,500, and our other choice is to change our diet. So my background is I was a professional chef before I became a doctor, and diet's easy for me. I can pretty much make anything taste good. And if it was gonna solve his problem, I wanted to do that. So we started to look at his diet, realized that I had always reacted to wheat. I knew I reacted to wheat and hadn't eaten much wheat all the way through med school, but I did have other gluten-containing grains in my diet. I was still eating barley, I was still eating rye, I was eating spelt, spelt, and I was eating farro and kamut, all gluten grains. And so we decided to go gluten-free for at least him and I. And then we looked at our 6-year-olds, or yeah, 7-year-olds at that point, and realized that when they had started school, they had stopped growing. And, you know, I'm a fairly compulsive doctor. I had been actually measuring them every month. Since they were 3. You know, as soon as they could stand in front of a tape measure, they were getting measured every month on their birthday and, you know, how much incremental growth. Well, about a month after they started school, they stopped growing. And that's a very unusual pattern. It's not a common growth change. But we realized we had like tripled their gluten intake as they started school. They started having bread for lunch every day and cookies cookies and cake, more cakes, and way more gluten than they ever ate when they were home with me. So we decided to take the entire family gluten-free and just see what happened. A month and a half later, the girls had grown. They sprouted an inch within that timeframe. Ed felt better. I felt better. And we never looked back. So I started blogging in order to document how I was changing recipes. You know, it was— I have a tech-savvy family, and one of my siblings said, "You should just put it online because it'd be easier for me to check your website than call you with the time difference," because she was trying to do it from the East Coast and I'm on the West Coast. And I said, "Okay, fine." You know, and I started up with Blogger because it was free and it was easy and, you know, lots of great reasons, and then moved it to WordPress when everybody in the food blogging world was moving their blogs to WordPress because you have a little more control and you have the ability to put ad networks in and actually make some money off your blog or at least pay your hosting fees. Mm-hmm, yeah. Yeah, it just became— it was a little bit accidental and then after about a year it became way not accidental. And I actually got my book contract because of my blog. I wrote— co-wrote Gluten Free Baking for Dummies, and my co-author found me from my blog. So if anybody's out there wondering why you keep writing when things aren't happening, you never know who's reading. That's definitely a good reason.

Now, is this part of your practice now where you really do a lot with gluten-free?

Oh, most of my practice is gluten intolerance and celiac disease. I do see the broad range of patients anywhere from infant to elders. I'm in a community of about 80,000 people and I'm known as the Gluten-Free Doctor within the community. I teach classes here in Bellingham. I teach classes sometimes down in Skagit County and I speak widely. I cross the border I'm an international speaker. I've gone up to Canada several times and spoken at the gluten intolerance group there and at the expos. That's where my work is moving. Once you get somebody on the right diet, there's only a yearly follow-up. The reality is people heal. They don't continue to have the reason why they came in. You know, everything from fibromyalgia and headaches and migraines and gastrointestinal problems, IBS, IBD, that was misdiagnosed to begin with and really is an underlying gluten response, hormonal changes, all that stuff clears up and they get better. They don't have to see me all the time.

How long does it usually take to affect the change?

If people are really diligent and go 100% gluten-free, they'll see changes within a month. They won't heal completely within that month, but they will see enough to be motivated to stay on a gluten-free diet. Now, the problem is it's gotta be 100% gluten-free. You can't be flirting around the edges because even a minor exposure will continue the underlying inflammatory responses. So somebody who says, "I'm just gonna cheat today," is actually cheating long-term and creating more damage long-term. So I just take people through a 30-day get it out of your diet and then go pig out on everything you were missing. And I do that way for two reasons. If they get sick sick as a dog on the food they were missing, it's an incredible motivator. I don't have to say a thing. Their body told them, "This is not what you need." It's really easy.

Dr. Pompa: What would be the types of signs that the average person would look for if gluten is an issue for them?

Meredith: If gluten is an issue, well, it can range, and that's the problem. There are so many different responses that people have. There's the gastrointestinal, so stomachaches, gas, bloating, diarrhea, constipation, and esophageal concerns. So people with GERD, I frequently say, "Okay, let's start from there," and we'll do a lot of different physical changes to their being first. I check people for hiatal hernias really rapidly because that happens for A lot of people have heard. And then, that's the gastrointestinal. Then for a lot of people, it is more in the nervous system. And so there'll be the people who have ADHD, especially children show up ADHD. Or they show up as unable to stop leg shaking, you know, the people who have a lot of concerns with restless leg. They're iron deficient because they don't have the ability to absorb the iron, and that's what's creating the restless leg. So it's a lot of investigation and going backwards. Migraines are a huge trigger for an awful lot of people. When they get gluten, they get a migraine, or they get a migraine a day later. For women, infertility— huge motivational tool for people to come into my office. They've been trying to get pregnant. They've been doing everything right, fabulous diet, and they can't get pregnant, or they get pregnant and they constantly miscarry. Those are the people— as soon as I hear a woman's had a miscarriage, I go back and start looking at their diet. Amazing. Yeah. I mean, it hits every— thyroid issues, type 1 diabetes, Sjögren's, lupus, they're all related to celiac disease.

In general, should everyone be gluten-free, or if you feel fine, if you just feel fine, you just don't have to worry about it?

What I say to people who are curious is that if you have a curiosity, there's typically something in your life that's not working for you. You wouldn't even be curious if everything was fine. Look at that curiosity. Is it— do you always If you feel like your clothes are one size too small after you've eaten, it could be just gas and bloating. If you consistently have a headache after you eat out and it's a situation where when you eat out is a different set of food than you typically eat at home, then look at that meal. You know, you could be having a reaction to a different food. It may not be gluten. People don't get curious unless there's an underlying reason why. I do a lot of diet diaries.

Obviously bread. What would be other common sources, the most common sources of gluten?

Gluten is a protein contained in wheat, rye, and barley. Rye we can pretty much eliminate unless you're eating rye bread. It doesn't get used in most food processing. But wheat exists in everything processed, unless it's been taken out. So anytime you're looking at white flour, pasta, breadings, coatings on things like fried chicken, um, coatings on things you wouldn't expect like French fries. As soon as you get a seasoned French fry, there's something holding that seasoning on the potato, and most time, it's wheat starch. Wheat is used in so many processed foods that I automatically tell people if it comes in a box, you've got to flip the box around and start reading because the chances are so huge. Barley is the other one that gets used a lot in processed foods. Barley malt is a sweetener, and the thing is that barley malt will show up in healthy healthier foods. A lot of the natural food products will use barley malt instead of sugar, thinking it— perceiving it as being healthier. It's not, but that's the perception, and we all know that perception sells. So that's where it shows up. The other side of it is it shows up in beer, and for an adult, beer is a huge one. That's my next question. There are gluten-free beers. There are some really good gluten-free beers and some people who have worked hard to make gluten-free beers that taste like gluten-full. But, you know, for people newly diagnosed, I just tell them to drink wine instead or hard cider. It's so much simpler. You know, get used to not drinking beer for a little while and then we'll get you back to beer. But unless, of course, you live in Portland. If you live in Portland, go drink Harvester because Harvester is awesome. Even I'm not close enough to go get my own at the brewery. That's the thing. Every processed food typically will have one source of gluten or maybe even two, one in the flour and one in the sweetener.

A lot of the— sorry, Chef. A lot of those popular diets must be They're probably— a lot of the benefits that they're achieving is probably due to the reduced gluten in the diet.

A lot of the times people feel better when they go on something like the Atkins diet, or they go on to a paleo diet, or even they go on to a vegan diet, except vegans don't necessarily feel better because almost every one of those meat replacers are made from wheat gluten. Actually, they end up going into a high-gluten diet without realizing it if they're using those processed replacers.

Yeah, makes sense.

Yeah. People who go Paleo, all of a sudden they go grain-free, and they feel fabulous. It could be because they don't do well with all grains, but it may be because they've just eliminated gluten. And it's the first time they have in their life. Interesting. I do encourage— I just want to make sure everybody hears it once because I've had people criticize me in the past. When you're going to try a gluten-free diet, at least get the blood work done. Don't necessarily go all the way to the biopsy, but get the blood work done first because once you go gluten-free, you can't have the blood work done. The only way to get the blood work done then is to go back on a gluten-full diet for a minimum of a month. Most people, when they feel better, will not do that. Go get the blood draw first.

Then go gluten-free. What do you mean by blood draw? What would you ask for when you go to the doctor? What are they looking for?

Right now, the standard is a panel of 4 tests. It's IgA, IgG, tissue transglutaminase, and anti-endomysial antibodies. Those are the 4 tests. Depending on where your doctor is, they may have something they call the celiac panel, and that's easy enough to do. It's just a blood draw. It's nothing more complicated than that. The complicated part is on the testing side, and at this point At this point, finally, in the last couple of years, they have changed and started to believe people when they ask for this testing. And so conventional doctors are actually ordering it. For the longest time, nobody would order it because, "Well, we don't see celiac disease." Now they're seeing it. Now it's getting diagnosed. Now there's more information. There's more research. Citations that say all this could be from an underlying gluten response. They're finally saying there may be people who are non-celiac gluten-sensitive people. And the only way to find out if that is the case is to go gluten-free. So more research brings more information.

If I was to go to the doctor, do I need to remember the names of these fancy tests, or can I just I want to check my gluten levels or whatever.

If you said to your doctor, "I want to be tested for celiac disease," they should know what the tests are, or they should be able to find out what their lab calls the panel. Okay. Yeah. They should. I have to admit, though, 7 years ago when we were going gluten-free, the doctors— I had to tell them that that we wanted to be tested for celiac.

Yeah. Yeah. I've had similar issues with doctors not quite knowing everything you think they would know.

Well, you know, I give them a lot of credit because quite honestly, the explosion in how much information is coming out of typical physicians these days, keeping up with every possible branch of medicine is not physically possible in one head. That's why people specialize because then they can narrow the focus. They can turn into niche doctors instead of niche bloggers. But Google helps a lot to get you to the point of, "I want to check this out." And then being able to listen to your doctor say, "Well, that may make sense and then maybe not." But I always look at people's family history, too. When my husband was trying to figure it out, we looked backwards in his family. Was there type 1 diabetes? Was there pernicious anemia? Was there a history of people with brittle bones, with osteoporosis? Were any of them men? You know, that made a big difference. So when we started doing that research into history and into genetics, it helped because celiac disease is genetic in part. And, you know, it means that you could inherit the genes. It doesn't mean that they get turned on, but it means you inherited the genes. Very interesting. There's so much about it. The whole first half of my book talks about diagnostics and being in a household full of gluten-free needs in a gluten-full house. You might want to check there. My blog is rich in those articles as well.

Once you get the blood drawn and you're going down this path, that, what do you do after that? I get the test done, and then I go gluten-free for a month, and then I go get another test done and compare, or—

No, actually, this is where you go experiential. You've gone gluten-free for 30 days, 100% gluten-free, no cheating, no piece of pizza on the weekend away from the family, nothing like that. Choose what you want to re-expose. And this is where I encourage people, if you've missed bagels, it's bagels. If you've missed baguettes, go get a baguette. Pick the food you have missed the most. Beer. And then eat it. Because what happens for most people, if gluten really is the problem, they're gonna be sick as a dog within an hour or so. And it's an incredibly motivating tool to have a food create an illness. You know, you'll— everybody builds up aversions all the time, and it's typically because they had a food they didn't like the smell or they got sick. Well, if you get sick eating a baguette after you've gone gluten-free for 30 days, I don't have to tell you to avoid baguettes. Right, right.

Yeah, I actually, I had an issue with caffeine and I had no idea. And once I realized what the problem was, it was no problem not to have caffeine.

Yeah, yeah. So I let that aversion technique work for them, or for, you know, the thing is I deal a lot with children and it's really challenging for parents to have a child with a gluten intolerance because nobody wants their kid to be different. It helped for my girls that their twin sister was sitting in the other classroom with the same weird diet. In Bellingham, there's a lot of people who are incredibly aware of food as medicine, and it helped a lot that there were other kids in other classrooms with gluten intolerance or with gluten and dairy intolerance, because that, for a lot of kids on the autism spectrum, that has become the way to treat as an initial treatment. So they go gluten-free, dairy-free, and that helps an awful lot of kids.

Fascinating.

I love that stuff. And it's easy, you know, you just have to go gluten-free, and after that you feel better.

Tracking can be hard. I've been intending to, but I just haven't taken the time to do the research myself to bother with it yet, but it's at the top of my help list.

If I could encourage anything, if you've been muddling along this far, this is probably, from here till New Year's, is the toughest course harder for people to avoid gluten. I mean, we're about to enter the gluten land. Cookies, cakes, pastries, pastas, casseroles.

Yeah. It's a tough time. I'm lucky in that regard, I think, because I'm not a big bread or pasta or any of that type of eater. So it'd be pretty easy for me, although the fried foods and some of the snacks, you know, that'll be difficult. But I think I could do it fairly easy, but we'll see.

French fries out are the hardest thing for a lot of people because if they're cooked in a fryer that's shared, so they're making something else in there and it's got a breaded coating, then all of your fries get little bits of breaded coating on them. And fries themselves, because like I said, anything that's got a seasoning on it, so any of the super spicy wedges or anything like that, it's all glued on with wheat starch. So it means asking a lot of questions when you go out to eat, but you'll find a place that's safe. The safe places tend to say so. And then you just have to look for yourself. Like, there's a restaurant in my town that most of the time I can eat at without having a problem. Except if they ran out of bread during the course of meal service and they were baking bread to catch up because their bread baking counter is about 3.5 feet away from their main counter. And if they're making bread over there and there's flour in the air, I'm going to get sick. So I, I've learned to walk up and ask, "Have you run out of bread?" And they think it's the craziest question, but I've learned that that's the one question I can ask, get a quick answer, and then I know if I'm safe or not. I'd much rather be safe than get sick.

You had mentioned before, I remember, what really struck me was, "I thought I was going to do my niece a favor and try and make her some gluten-free things." You said that even a crumb from toast on butter, if you get it, or even some residue in the mixer or the beater that wasn't completely cleaned out can do it. That just freaked me out. I thought, "Wow." Wow.

It's 20 parts per million. So think a tablespoon in a swimming pool. It's small. You get a reaction. That's why 100% gluten-free is important. But if you want to go 100% gluten-free, eat all the vegetables, all the fruit, and all the meat you want. Just don't sauce a damn thing, and you're good. You're good. Dairy is mostly gluten-free. You have to watch anything that gets mixed in, but like milk and basic cheeses and butter, you don't have a problem. It's more concerning to have somebody else in the same house swipe the butter to put it on bread and put toast crumbs back on as they go for another swipe. You keep separate. Or you, you know, in most houses I say just label the gluten-free stuff and, you know, put big red X's on it or something so people see it when they go for the container. In jam and jelly, just put it into a squeeze bottle and let it be a squeeze-out instead of— that way nobody gets contaminated. But there are a lot of tricks to keep people safe, and you need to use them all.

Good to know. Now, your husband is an Oriental medicine— He's an acupuncturist. Okay. Yeah. I did a lot— I delved a lot of that into that earlier years ago, and I— a lot of their philosophies on eating make a lot of sense too, like eating seasonal, eating things that are grown in your area. And does that tie in well with what you do with your practice?

Oh, absolutely, yeah. He has a practice that's a community acupuncture clinic, which he— it's a kind of fun group Dennis Littley, they're all over the United States. Everybody has a situation where they have multiple chairs in the room, and so you come in, you sit down, it's much more like you would go to acupuncture in the Asian countries. You come in, you sit down, you're taken care of, and you just are there with a whole crowd of people. He has 9 chairs, so you can get up to 9 people in his clinic. And that way he can move from patient to patient more rapidly, and he can bring the cost down. Can come see him for as little as $15 and they get better. Yeah. And he's thrilled to be able to do this. His clinic is called Hamster Puncture. We're in Bellingham, so Hamster Puncture. And it's great fun. He does do some diet suggestions for people, and the idea of living and eating what's in your area, in part that's because the biosphere microbes that exist in our soil in our area actually can enhance our ability to digest what's in our area. So eating locally, eating seasonally, you're eating what you need for that period of time. You know, like right now we're massively in apple season. We're in Washington. We grow all the apples for everywhere else. So eating apples here We're picking, you know, the orchard is literally a couple miles away. Does that make more sense than importing avocados from California? Yeah. Do we still eat avocados from California? Yeah. You know, but it really helps people's diet to be local and be seasonal and hopefully be without pesticides and definitely without genetic genetically modified organisms. And I had to say that I am definitely, most certainly, a yes on 522. So hopefully we're going to have labeling on genetic modification foods so that we'll know whether or not we're eating them. It gives us information, and that's all it is.

Yep, good tool, always. We have one other question here from Karen, and we actually have a couple questions but let's get to this one first because it's been up here for a while. And this is, I guess, to Craig. Thanks for the structured data tool. I just tested a page that I am a contributor for and it does not have a G+ authorship provided. There is no publisher markup. I don't own this page.

What can I do? In that case, pretty much the only thing you can do is talk to the owner of the site and have the appropriate authorship link added to your bio on that post. And if they're not providing the bio or the byline, you should ask them to do that.

Okay, and we have one here for Jean from Kim. Let me get it up here. You mentioned poor calcium absorption. What can folks do that have wheat and dairy allergies and sensitivities?

The reality is we absorb calcium far better from dark leafy greens than we do from dairy. The dairy and milk and calcium connection is a bit of information that was put out by the Dairy Board. So yes, you can absorb calcium from dairy. We absorb it far greater from dark leafy greens. So it's time to eat your kale and chard and spinach. And when you do, make sure that there's some citrus with it or vitamin C source, apple cider vinegar or something like that, because we absorb calcium better when there's a vitamin C source with it. So when I make kale sautéed for dinner and throw in a bunch of garlic, and then just before I'm going to serve it, I'll splash in some apple cider vinegar to provide that ability. Um, it also lets us absorb the iron in green leafy greens just as quickly. The other place to look is other whole grains. And whole grains for calcium, I would think sorghum. I'd look at quinoa. And being able to kind of build multiple layers of the dish so you're balancing out your nutrients. Yeah, I make a sorghum salad that's got wild salmon in it and cherries and some mint, and it's a salad. And between the calcium in the salmon bones and the calcium in the sorghum and the cherries, I've provided the vitamin C. It's wonderful, it's tasty, and it is something I tend to make large pots of and leave it in the refrigerator all summer. You know, I'll make it for a week and then just eat from the fridge. Easy. Excellent.

So I had a question for Michael. How do you— I love that you're sort of approaching the content aspect, or you're marketing yourself in a way that's completely separate from your business now. How did you sell that to your employer?

It's a work in progress, let's say. I'm fighting a battle pretty much every day. I've done a lot with the website that we built. It's brought in a large amount of revenue, and I'm always looking at how I can design better operations and practices and procedures, things that will make us more efficient. But it's a difficult— it is a difficult sell because there's no immediate return on investment. Right. So it's very, very long-term. And again, there has to be— ultimately I'm trying to brand my business through these means. And again, no one cares about your business unless they know who you are. Yes, you can name a few big brands and they're followed by millions of people, that's awesome, but business is not— business to business is changing and the way that business is done is shifting and it's becoming a lot more personal and a lot more open. And I feel that the way that business has been done up to this point, everybody is hiding their trade secrets, everybody is doing what they can to protect all their valuable information. And you know what, that's not going to help anymore because it's out there. Everything is out there. If you want to find something out, go ahead. You know, I have to put out what we can— I'm trying to convince— it's a family business, so I'm trying to convince the family that it's best to show what we can do. If people want to go try and do what we do, go ahead. You know, you want to try and get metal sourced, have it heat-treated, ground down to size, cut to length, shipped to a customer so that they can get their plane off the ground in 24 hours, try it. You know, good luck. You know, and if you can do it, God bless. You know, I think that that's awesome. You know, you should be celebrated too. But until that happens, you gotta know that we've been here for 30 years and we're gonna do a good job. So, you know, it's just a matter of differentiating yourself. You know, so I'm differentiating myself and hopefully I can differentiate my business. But again, you gotta start personally because no one's just gonna gravitate towards your business. No one's gonna say, oh hey, Michelin Metals, that's awesome, I can't wait to interact with you and engage with you. You know, it's got to be you as a face of the business and then you move forward.

So I think it's awesome what you're doing and I would just encourage you to document the process along the way and how it goes and how it affects the business long term. That would be fascinating info.

Yeah, well, I was just speaking with somebody from a larger social media site and they're kind of interested in in potentially connecting with me and potentially maybe doing some sort of case study that would show the impact that it's having. And, you know, again, I was doing Hangouts with a metallurgist for a while and explaining about metals, and he would tell me a little bit about the history and, you know, its chemistry. It was fascinating, fascinating stuff. And, you know, that's a way that you can integrate Google+ Hangouts and an off-topic, off-social media business because there's nobody in social in the metal industry. I could do a YouTube, I could do a Hangout and literally rank as soon as I hit end broadcast and even during, I mean, and there's no one doing it. I'm trying to own that space and the metals industry is quite a large industry. Everything that you touch pretty much has metal in it. So to go out there— I'm the only person that has authorship set up in the entire industry, pretty much. So hey, great. I will take it. So I couldn't do that without Google+. I couldn't have met the metallurgist without Google+. So again, the metallurgist kind of took a break. So if anybody's a metallurgist out there, you let me know. Again, it's a tough sell. It's a very tough sell. I feel somewhere deep down in my intuitive portions of myself that what I'm doing is on the right path, and I'm being encouraged by some pretty influential people here, and I'm going to continue to do that. But it's a battle every day, battling. Just this morning, I got to start selling more.

Go! But do they see how your interactions show up as— I mean, you just raised your status, which of course raises Michelin medals. If somebody went out to look for hardened steel, what are they going to find? They're going to find you. Yeah, I mean, you just got—

sorry to interrupt, go ahead.

No, no, no, no. It seems to me that it would be short-sighted to kind of write it off because you're the first one there. You're the first one there.

Yeah, exactly. And you know, for instance, aerospace metal in the next, hopefully, couple years, there's a potential that if you want to buy aerospace metal and make parts from aerospace metal and supply parts to Boeing and Northrop and Lockheed and BAE and all these guys, you might actually have to buy it from an AS9120 certified company, which is an international quality standard along with ISO 9001. But it's the aerospace, it's a tougher aspect of that standard, you might have to buy from somebody that's certified. So we got our woman-owned small business a year or two ago. We just got our AS9120 certification and we're also ISO 9001 certified and we're just a small little shop. But if you look up AS9120 metal supplier, I'm 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. So if that happens in a couple of years, yes sir, we will be ready to go. So, you know, it's just, it just takes It just takes some seeds. It's like planting your garden. You're not going to come out, plant the seeds the first day, come out day 2 and be like, "Oh, there's tomatoes ready to go and they're awesome." It takes months. Translate that to business, it takes years. Lots of hard work that people just think I'm in here right now having a good time. You're just messing around, having fun, not doing anything. We'll just let them think that. I keep doing what I know is right.

It's hard to convince them sometimes that what you're doing actually has a purpose, and especially this is so new for so many people. I mentioned this to my company about doing this for them and changing the face of how we do business, and they're going— and the VP goes, oh yeah, that's like chat rooms, right? Perfect, exactly.

It's like chat rooms on AOL in 1995.

It's a chat room that creates evergreen content. With no extra work. Yeah, that's typical. Great statement.

Exactly, exactly. Make a YouTube video, make an HOA, and you're then selling yourself indefinitely indexed in search. That's terrible. Who would ever want to do that?

Right, right. And if you know how to edit your YouTubes, you can create those sound bites to be used in commercials without having any other production costs. Gee, that seems just stupid. I'm reaching out to a lot of brands to try and use this tool for all those things that brands want. They want to be able to talk to their consumers about their product. Here's a free to use thing and all you need is internet. Preferably wired. I mean, really. It's so easy.

Craig, you had something?

Yeah, I was just wondering, Michael, what initially made you take social media seriously? What set that in action?

It was probably the fact that your posts could be indexed on Google+. And not a lot of my physical posts are indexed because just like everything else, in order to get indexed, you have to have some activity on that post. Google just— I post a sunrise picture every morning and night or whatever, and that post isn't going to get indexed most likely because no one cares about a sunrise when they're looking on the internet. They want to go find an article about a specific topic that's happening right now. There has to be some delineation between what is indexed and what's not. Then again, there are certain profiles out there where they'll post something and within 1 second it's indexed regardless of what it is. It's just a matter of eventually the only way to achieve that is by having a strong enough profile to where your posts are indexed. You can't do that unless you see engagement. You can't see engagement without interacting. Whole ball of wax comes out. You really just got to start slow and build and build and build and build and build and build some more. Eventually things might happen. Might. Yeah. Cool.

But you do find yourself having a whole lot of fun then as you're engaging and as you're posting and as you're talking to more people. What seemed to be a chore, because one of the comments out of a lot of bloggers I hear is one more social social media, I don't need to do. No, you don't need to do it. You don't have to come here. You don't have to use it. You know, let it stay our little secret here, and when you go away on the searches, that'll be fine too. But you know, you can't take that attitude. You gotta go in and delve away from what you're doing and talk just like we're talking. We're so diverse here today, it's unbelievable. And we can ask each other questions and we can talk to each other and we can find friends in each other's specialty, and it's just amazing. And you can't find that anywhere else, right?

Yes, I think it's awesome. Just like, we're doing business right now, but it's just a pleasure.

Yeah, absolutely. And back to one of the things earlier, the boss just came in and gave me the— hey, yeah, yeah, it's a constant battle. It's like, I'm coming. That's why I work for myself. Smart man.

Well, we are running a little late, but it has been a really good talk, and I think we covered a lot of really interesting topics. You know, it's a great show, and this is how we learn, this is how we grow, and this is how we engage with each other, and it's all because of Google+. So it's always a good day on Google+. So, Craig, thank you so much for coming today.

No problem, thanks for having me.

My pleasure. Gene, thank you, it's always great to see you. Please. And Michael, very nice to see you today, and I hope to see you down in Florida when you get down there over the holidays. Absolutely. I'll be relocating shortly. Absolutely, thank you for having me. My pleasure. So everyone, thank you so much for coming. It's been a good day on Google+ and we'll see you soon.