Does Code Order Matter?
-
I read/was told that it was a good idea to order your HTML to show the most important content first. So, on many sites I had put my global navigation div, for instance, below my main content div. Does this still apply? And does wise use of HTML 5 mean this is no longer necessary (eg use of "nav" section tag to indicate this section is about navigation).
In the same vein, how does Google know that my sidebar nav is my sidebar nav (which your site seems to say is probably given less weight than top nav), and how does it know my topnav is my top nav? Maybe a daft question, but when someone asked me yesterday I realised I didn't know!
(Phew - at last I have asked a short question!).
-
Perhaps HTML5 tags are used as one of the signals in determining which piece of source code is what. Seeing how easily one could manipulate these tags, I don't think it'll be a strong signal though. Of course it can be a good guidance for future web developers to identify pieces of source code!
Google is able to read CSS files (for example to determine if a link is hidden), but I don't think it will parse these files and apply them to the webpage to determine the visual layout of it. I think it would require a great amount of processing power (and time) to actually render a webpage, rather than sort out the pieces based on the source code like I described in my answer above.
Glad I could help!
-
Thank you - and very happy to receive a longer answer than my question!
That certainly answers my basic question, and I really appreciate it.
What do you think about the more "semantic" tags of HTML5 - such as the "nav"? Surely it's a good idea to use them to help Google (and later web developers) on their way with understanding the structure of the content?
And, a related question, can and does Google read CSS files to determine structure too? It's not mentioned on the blog post you pointed me to (and thanks for pointing me to it - a very helpful article in all sorts of ways which I hadn't read.)
-
I got the same question during a presentation I was giving recently and have to admit I didn't knew the answer on the spot either. Some thinking and discussing with others has given me a pretty clear picture on this though, which I will now try to pass on to you.
I don't think code order matters that much anymore. A couple years ago, when Google was crawling only a portion of a large webpage (mostly due to hardware restrictions), you'd better make sure your valuable text or links were placed in the first part of your webpage, otherwise it wouldn't get crawled at all! With Google crawling large webpage in total (if I recall some quote from Matt Cutts correctly he stated that they now index webpages over several MBs in size, as long as they contain enough valuable information).
With Google advancing their detection of the 'visual location' where text and links are placed on a webpage (see #5 on http://www.seomoz.org/blog/10-illustrations-on-search-engines-valuation-of-links), source code ordering will most likely have dropped in value as well. Using CSS styling, we can now order our source code pretty much at will anyway, which has changed it from a valid signal to a 'SEO trick' (just like adding a suffix to the URL has, see http://www.finishjoomla.com/blog/5/does-adding-a-suffix-to-my-urls-affect-my-seo/).
By 'viewing' (and perhaps manually categorizing or using machine learning http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_learning) webpages Google will notice patterns in webpage source code. For example: 'that div containing a large amount of links, usually placed in an ul-li, often containing links to 'home' and 'contact' will most likely be your menu. Just like 'that div containing more text than any other div, often starting with a H1 or H2 tag, containing the most images and ending with a call-to-action' link will most likely be your page content area. Thus, Google doesn't 'know' whether a certain part of your source code is your menu, your sidebar or your page content, it deducts it by looking at common patterns.
(lol, my answer is more than three times as long as your short question!)
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Does the position of your main keyword phrase matter within the page?
The addition of a new grid type navigation within the body of our page could mean that the keyword phrase the page is optimized for could be pushed below the fold. Is this a bad thing?
On-Page Optimization | | Catherine_Selectaglaze1 -
Code Quality checker tool?
Hi All, I have seen one tool - http://nibbler.silktide.com/ which give code quality score and if we go for pro version it's name is sitebeam - http://nibbler.silktide.com/en_US/pro Can anyone share experience of this tool? Also any other tool you can suggest to check code quality of ecommerce site? Pls don't suggest manual checking. Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | pragnesh96390 -
Does pages with same products but with different orders count as duplication?
Let's say I got an e-commerce website. In that website I have 3 different pages: New products: display paged products order by created time descendingly Hot products: display paged products order by viewed Random products: display paged products randomly
On-Page Optimization | | vuquangchien
So are those 3 pages should be considered duplicated content? Should I canonicalize them to New product page (with paging), or should I create a new page without paging and point all of 3 pages above to that page (this page doesn't make sense from user experience but look good for crawler)?0 -
Will changing order of bullet points in product descriptions add some uniqueness?
We write our own unique product descriptions and have a unique product video for each color variation and multiple unique product images and display seperate user reviews per color variation. We prefer to have seperate product pages for each color variation for several reasons (targeting color searches and user experience seeing all color variations when browsing category pages). Product descriptions of color variations are quite similar.
On-Page Optimization | | lcourse
I was thinking about spinning dynamically order how bullet points of product descriptions are presented to add some more uniqueness. I am not expecting a massive impact, but do you think this increases a bit googles perception of page uniqueness?0 -
Does Commented HTML Code Get Spidered?
I have a change, perhaps temporary, to my web store that I will be making. I am wondering if the code that I will comment out () gets spidered?
On-Page Optimization | | lbohen0 -
Html and css errors - what do SE spiders do if they come across coding errors? Do they stop crawling the rest of the code below the error
I have a client who uses a template to build their websites (no problem with that) when I ran the site through w3c validator it threw up a number of errors, most of which where minor eg missing close tags and I suggested they fix them before I start their off site SEO campaigns. When I spoke to their web designer about the issues I was told that some of the errors where "just how its done" So if that's the case, but the validator still registers the error, do the SE spiders ignore them and move on, or does it penalize the site in some way?
On-Page Optimization | | pab10 -
Does the keyword meta tag not matter anymore?
In the SeoMoz report generated, it recommended removing the meta keywords tag as it was no long relevant? why is google no longer considering this?
On-Page Optimization | | mancmusicman0 -
Has anyone ever attempted (successfully or not) to consciously reduce their amount of homepage links in order to improve their search engine rankings?
I work for a retail company that is highly segmented. We have a lot of categories to cover the types of merchandise we offer on our home page, and way more than the recommended # of links on our homepage because of it. Has anyone ever attempted (successfully or not) to consciously reduce their amount of links (and categories) in order to improve their search engine rankings? If so, can you walk through your process and your advice on whether or not reducing links on a site like mine is a good idea?
On-Page Optimization | | reallygoodstuff0