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I have a page which contains a list of items as its content.
When no items exist, the design which I am to implement has a rather large heading reading something like:
'No results for this topic'
Now initially when I saw the design I instinctively wrapped the 'No results' text in a <h2> tag.
Afterwards I noticed that although I included meta content for title and description - Google displayed the 'no results' text as the title in search results - clearly not being the desired result.
Now on one hand I want to stick to semantic markup, but on the other I don't want it to mess up my SEO.
So my question is: Do I really need to use a <h2> element here for semantic markup?
True, the designer decided to display the text to look like a heading - but does this mean semantically that this is a heading?
Just for fun, I checked what Google does when you enter a search phrase with no results:
Result:
The 'No results' isn't displayed like a heading and (hence) not within a h1-h6 tag.
Disclaimer: I tried searching for an answer at W3C here and here but that didn't really help me here.
Edit: I meant the 'No results' to be an example. Actually, I had similar cases where Google picked up other pieces of not-so-relevant text (which I had wrapped in a <h2> because of the design) as the title - even when the page contained many items.
I think that such message shouldn't appear in h2 tag. But there are also other factors that determine what Google will display. All title, description and keywords should vary between pages but it also doesn't guarantee Google will use them.
In fact Google want to be smarter than we are. For one of my pages for English main page version Google used alt logo to display as page title although title is unique so now in Google it's displayed as mainpage - logo instead of normal title.
If I were you I would change "no results" from h2 to regular text for example p. You should also consider if you really need and should have indexed those pages at all.
Google "guidelines" change very often and they can even punish you if you have many subpages with in fact no content.
-- after editing question --
You should check first that your meta tags if they are unique on your page. It means searches (if it is indexes, pagination pages and so on). As I have written just before there is no guarantee that Google uses them at all. Google can use any part of your site and display it in search result as title or description.
Sitemap has no impact what Google indexes (or other search engines). It only help search engines faster index pages that are for example deep in structure. For sub-pages you don't want to be indexed you need to use in html head:
<meta name="Robots" content="noindex,nofollow" />
to stop indexing it by search engines that respect this rule (of course many crawlers / spam spiders don't respect it). After change it takes some time to deindex this page by Google. It depends of course on site size and how often Google spider is visiting your website.
I'm building an AJAX based portfolio module using pushState / hash bangs and as I'm ruling out browsers without JavaScript the only thing that concerns me is how limited the HTML custom data attributes are when it comes to SEO.
For example, using the code below:
<ul class="gallery" data-anchor="/photography/example/" data-title="Example"></ul>
Will the data-title be indexed, i.e. will that text content be gathered by Google? Or would I need to include a header tag in or around the list as a descriptive complement? The data-title is meant to be used as a new window title once the user clicks on that particular gallery.
No, it won't be indexed. The attribute itself will be cached with the page, but Google has no context of what the attribute or the value means, so it is meaningless to search engines.
You should assume that all HTML content can be used to some extent by a search engine.
However, I would say almost invariably that visible content will be weighted much more heavily than invisible content. Even if Google does use data attributes in its weighting algorithm, you should make the content visible to users too
I have added meta tag description in my page, but it is not displaying when I search my page in google.
It is displaying something else from my blog page. Please let me know if any one is aware of this.
Thanks in advance!!
Anand
The meta description is only a hint - it's not guaranteed to be used. If you search for your site like this: site:watchcricket-online.blogspot.com instead, then you'll see the meta description, verifying you've entered it correctly.
The snippet that is shown on the search engine result page depends on the keywords the person searches for, so you can't really target any specific text there.
You should also be aware that Google doesn't actually use the description as part of it's ranking algorithm - words that are in the description don't count as part of the page. (i.e. if your description was wueoqwiueoiuoiauiouwqoeuq, your page wouldn't rank for that term if the only place it was was in the description.)
Google does not always show the meta description. If it finds something better on your site to use, it uses that snippet instead.
Look at this article to learn more.
Google may or may not use meta tag descriptions. Mostly it doesn’t, because experience shows that they are widely used by site authors for excessive and often misleading advertising instead of informative content. But in special cases, especially when there are no useful matches for the search words in content, it may use meta tag descriptions, as you can see by googling with
url:watchcricket-online.blogspot.com
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I have my blog (you can see it if you want, from my profile), and it's fresh, as well as google robots parsing results are.
The results were alarming to me. Apparently the most common 2 words on my site are "rss" and "feed", because I use text for links like "Comments RSS", "Post Feed", etc. These 2 words will be present in every post, while other words will be more rare.
Is there a way to make these links disappear from Google's parsing? I don't want technical links getting indexed. I only want content, titles, descriptions to get indexed. I am looking for something other than replacing this text with images.
I found some old discussions on Google, back from 2007 (I think in 3 years many things could have changed, hopefully this too)
This question is not about robots.txt and how to make Google ignore pages. It is about making it ignore small parts of the page, or transforming the parts in such a way that it will be seen by humans and invisible to robots.
There is a simple way to tell google to not index parts of your documents, that is using googleon and googleoff:
<p>This is normal (X)HTML content that will be indexed by Google.</p>
<!--googleoff: index-->
<p>This (X)HTML content will NOT be indexed by Google.</p>
<!--googleon: index-->
In this example, the second paragraph will not be indexed by Google. Notice the “index” parameter, which may be set to any of the following:
index — content surrounded by “googleoff: index” will not be indexed
by Google
anchor — anchor text for any links within a “googleoff: anchor” area
will not be associated with the target page
snippet — content surrounded by “googleoff: snippet” will not be used
to create snippets for search results
all — content surrounded by “googleoff: all” are treated with all
source
Google ignores HTML tags which have data-nosnippet:
<p>
This text can be included in a snippet
<span data-nosnippet>and this part would not be shown</span>.
</p>
Source: Special tags that Google understands - Inline directives
I work on a site with top-3 google ranking for thousands of school names in the US, and we do a lot of work to protect our SEO. There are 3 main things you could do (which are all probably a waste of time, keep reading):
Move the stuff you want to downplay to the bottom of your HTML and use CSS and/or to place it where you want readers to see it. This won't hide it from crawlers, but they'll value it lower.
Replace those links with images (you say you don't want to do that, but don't explain why not)
Serve a different page to crawlers, with those links stripped. There's nothing black hat about this, as long as the content is fundamentally the same as a browser sees. Search engines will ding you if you serve up a page that's significantly different from what users see, but if you stripped RSS links from the version of the page crawlers index, you would not have a problem.
That said, crawlers are smart, and you're not the only site filled with permalink and rss links. They care about context, and look for terms and phrases in your headings and body text. They know how to determine that your blog is about technology and not RSS. I highly doubt those links have any negative effect on your SEO. What problem are you actually trying to solve?
If you want to build SEO, figure out what value you provide to readers and write about that. Say interesting things that will lead others to link to your blog, and crawlers will understand that you're an information source that people value. Think more about what your readers see and understand, and less about what you think a crawler sees.
Firstly think about the issue. If Google think "RSS" is the main keyword that may suggest the rest of your content is a bit shallow and needs expanding. Perhaps this should be the focus of your attention.If the rest of your content is rich I wouldn't worry about the issue as a search engine should know what the page is about from title and headings. Just make sure RSS etc is not in a heading or bold or strong tag.
Secondly as you rightly mention, you probably don't want use images as they are not assessable to screen readers without alt text and if they have alt text or supporting text then you add the keyword back in. However aria live may help you get around this issue, but I'm not an expert on accessibility.
Options:
Use JavaScript to write that bit of content (maybe ajax it in after load). Search engines like Google can execute JavaScript but I would guess it wont value any JS written content very highly.
Re-word the content or remove duplicates of it, one prominent RSS feed link may be better than several smaller ones dotted around the page.
Use the css content attribute with pseudo :before or :after to add your content. I'm not sure if bots will index words in content attributes in CSS and know that contents value in relation to each page but it seems unlikely. Putting words like RSS in the CSS basically says it's a style thing not an HTML thing, therefore even if engines to index it they wont add much/any value to it. For example, the HTML and CSS could be:
.add-text:after { content:'View my RSS feed'; }
Note the above will not work in older versions of IE, so you may need some IE version comments if you care about that.
"googleon" and "googleoff" are only supported by the Google Search Appliance (when you host your own search results, usually for your own internal website).
They are not supported by Google's web-search at all. So please refrain from doing that and I think that should not be marked as a correct answer as this might create ambiguity.
Now, to get Google to exclude part of a page, you will need to place that content in a separate file, such as excluded.html, and use an iframe to display that content in the host page.
The iframe tag grabs content from another file and inserts it into the host page. I think there is no other available method so far.
The only control that you have over the indexing robots, is the robots.txt file. See this documentation, linked by Google on their page explaining the usage of the file.
You basically can prohibit certain links and URL's but not necessarily keywords.
Other than black-hat server-side methods, there is nothing you can do. You may want to look at why you have those words so often and remove some of them from the site.
It used to be that you could use JS to "hide" things from googlebot, but you can't now that it parses JS. ( http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4159807.htm )
Google crawler are smart but someone that program them are smartest. Human always sees what is sensible in the page, they will spend time on blog that have some nice content and most rare and unique.
It is all about common sense, how people visit your blog and how much time they spend. Google measure the search result in the same way. Your page ranking also increase as daily visits increase and site content get better and update every day.
This page has "Answer" words repeated multiple times. It doesn't mean that it will not get indexed. It is how much useful is to every one.
I hope it will give you some idea
you have to manually detect the "Google Bot" from request's user agent and feed them little different content than you normally serve to your user.
What work, if any, has been done to automatically determine the most important data within an html document? As an example, think of your standard news/blog/magazine-style website, containing navigation (with submenu's possibly), ads, comments, and the prize - our article/blog/news-body.
How would you determine what information on a news/blog/magazine is the primary data in an automated fashion?
Note: Ideally, the method would work with well-formed markup, and terrible markup. Whether somebody uses paragraph tags to make paragraphs, or a series of breaks.
Readability does a decent job of exactly this.
It's open source and posted on Google Code.
UPDATE: I see (via HN) that someone has used Readability to mangle RSS feeds into a more useful format, automagically.
think of your standard news/blog/magazine-style website, containing navigation (with submenu's possibly), ads, comments, and the prize - our article/blog/news-body.
How would you determine what information on a news/blog/magazine is the primary data in an automated fashion?
I would probably try something like this:
open URL
read in all links to same website from that page
follow all links and build a DOM tree for each URL (HTML file)
this should help you come up with redundant contents (included templates and such)
compare DOM trees for all documents on same site (tree walking)
strip all redundant nodes (i.e. repeated, navigational markup, ads and such things)
try to identify similar nodes and strip if possible
find largest unique text blocks that are not to be found in other DOMs on that website (i.e. unique content)
add as candidate for further processing
This approach of doing it seems pretty promising because it would be fairly simple to do, but still have good potential to be adaptive, even to complex Web 2.0 pages that make excessive use of templates, because it would identify similiar HTML nodes in between all pages on the same website.
This could probably be further improved by simpling using a scoring system to keep track of DOM nodes that were previously identified to contain unique contents, so that these nodes are prioritized for other pages.
Sometimes there's a CSS Media section defined as 'Print.' It's intended use is for 'Click here to print this page' links. Usually people use it to strip a lot of the fluff and leave only the meat of the information.
http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/media.html
I would try to read this style, and then scrape whatever is left visible.
You can use support vector machines to do text classification. One idea is to break pages into different sections (say consider each structural element like a div is a document) and gather some properties of it and convert it to a vector. (As other people suggested this could be number of words, number of links, number of images more the better.)
First start with a large set of documents (100-1000) that you already choose which part is the main part. Then use this set to train your SVM.
And for each new document you just need to convert it to vector and pass it to SVM.
This vector model actually quite useful in text classification, and you do not need to use an SVM necessarily. You can use a simpler Bayesian model as well.
And if you are interested, you can find more details in Introduction to Information Retrieval. (Freely available online)
I think the most straightforward way would be to look for the largest block of text without markup. Then, once it's found, figure out the bounds of it and extract it. You'd probably want to exclude certain tags from "not markup" like links and images, depending on what you're targeting. If this will have an interface, maybe include a checkbox list of tags to exclude from the search.
You might also look for the lowest level in the DOM tree and figure out which of those elements is the largest, but that wouldn't work well on poorly written pages, as the dom tree is often broken on such pages. If you end up using this, I'd come up with some way to see if the browser has entered quirks mode before trying it.
You might also try using several of these checks, then coming up with a metric for deciding which is best. For example, still try to use my second option above, but give it's result a lower "rating" if the browser would enter quirks mode normally. Going with this would obviously impact performance.
I think a very effective algorithm for this might be, "Which DIV has the most text in it that contains few links?"
Seldom do ads have more than two or three sentences of text. Look at the right side of this page, for example.
The content area is almost always the area with the greatest width on the page.
I would probably start with Title and anything else in a Head tag, then filter down through heading tags in order (ie h1, h2, h3, etc.)... beyond that, I guess I would go in order, from top to bottom. Depending on how it's styled, it may be a safe bet to assume a page title would have an ID or a unique class.
I would look for sentences with punctuation. Menus, headers, footers etc. usually contains seperate words, but not sentences ending containing commas and ending in period or equivalent punctuation.
You could look for the first and last element containing sentences with punctuation, and take everything in between. Headers are a special case since they usually dont have punctuation either, but you can typically recognize them as Hn elements immediately before sentences.
While this is obviously not the answer, I would assume that the important content is located near the center of the styled page and usually consists of several blocks interrupted by headlines and such. The structure itself may be a give-away in the markup, too.
A diff between articles / posts / threads would be a good filter to find out what content distinguishes a particular page (obviously this would have to be augmented to filter out random crap like ads, "quote of the day"s or banners). The structure of the content may be very similar for multiple pages, so don't rely on structural differences too much.
Instapaper does a good job with this. You might want to check Marco Arment's blog for hints about how he did it.
Today most of the news/blogs websites are using a blogging platform.
So i would create a set of rules by which i would search for content.
By example two of the most popular blogging platforms are wordpress and Google Blogspot.
Wordpress posts are marked by:
<div class="entry">
...
</div>
Blogspot posts are marked by:
<div class="post-body">
...
</div>
If the search by css classes fails you could turn to the other solutions, identifying the biggest chunk of text and so on.
As Readability is not available anymore:
If you're only interested in the outcome, you use Readability's successor Mercury, a web service.
If you're interested in some code how this can be done and prefer JavaScript, then there is Mozilla's Readability.js, which is used for Firefox's Reader View.
If you prefer Java, you can take a look at Crux, which does also pretty good job.
Or if Kotlin is more your language, then you can take a look at Readability4J, a port of above's Readability.js.