SEO by the Sea

Web pages can be messy; they can have more than one topic on a page, and use templates that surround those topics adding little meaning to the meat of the content, filled with links and labels, advertising and boilerplate, copyright and other notices.

With a diversity of topics, those pages may not be easily crawled and recorded and indexed and found, by search engines and searchers.

When we think of search engines and how they work, we often break what they do down into three main parts – discovering new pages and new content on old pages, indexing content on those pages following rules that show a preference for important pages and unique content, and presenting relevant and meaningful information to searchers and their intents (or at least matching their keywords) in response to queries that they enter into a search box.

We usually don’t think of search engines as indexing parts of pages, chunks of information that might exist side-by-side with very different topics, and yet many pages are messy like that.

But we’ve had signs from the white papers and patent filings that we see from search engineers, that they might try to segment and capture information about different topics found on the same page.

Continue reading Microsoft Granted Patent on Vision-Based Document Segmentation (VIPS)

Come gather ’round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You’ll be drenched to the bone.
If your time to you
Is worth savin’
Then you better start swimmin’
Or you’ll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin’.

- Bob Dylan

Can the rate of change upon web pages influence how Google might rank pages of a site?

In part one of this series, I looked at how Google’s patent on Information retrieval based on historical data focused upon Freshness.

This second part of the series explores how Google might look at content changes on Web pages, and how the frequency of those changes might influence how those pages may rank at the search engine. Keep in mind that we don’t know for certain whether Google is even using the processes described in this patent. But it is a possibility.

Continue reading Updating Google’s Historical Data Patent, Part 2 – Changing Content

Images on a web page can provide a chance to express ideas in a visual way that can convey a considerable amount of information, and may also add to the attractiveness and perceived quality of a site.

When search engines rank pages in search results, images may have some impact in those rankings.

A search engine might look at the captions associated with pictures, or alt text provided as an alternative for when people browse the Web without images turned on or when those browsers are using screen reading software.

Search engines might also look at text surrounding an image, especially within the same HTML container, or block or segment.

Those indexing services could also associate other content on a page with an image, including the page’s title.

Continue reading How Search Engines May Use Images to Rank Web Pages