SEO & Page Segmentation Analysis

If you’re looking for some fairly heavy SEO reading, something beyond the “Top 10-this” and “5-Tips-for-that” type of post, spend some time reading Dave Harry’s post on how search engines may get more granular with page segmentation analysis.

If you’re not familiar with the term, page segmentation involves splitting a web page into separate pieces and analyzing each piece individually, rather than as part of the whole. (It’s also been called “block level analysis” and probably a few other things, too.)

In theory, this type of analysis allows a search engine spider to more easily focus on the “meat” of a web page and ignore the garnish — things like the main site navigation, advertisements, and other page elements that aren’t necessarily tied directly to the page content. Yahoo even introduced the Robots-Nocontent tag in May, 2007, to let webmasters themselves help with page segmentation.

Dave’s article covers how and why search engines would want to do more page segmentation analysis and what the implications might be in terms of SEO. Here’s a bit on how link analysis could be affected:

Consider a page with a variety of semantically or not so related content, complete with links (internal or external). Traditional analysis tells us that the page is treated as a whole and thus link relevance can be effected from a lack of focused theme. If search engines can begin to break out blocks of information, independent of the whole, new valuations can be had for links from within a single document. In short there could be more link juice to go around.

(emphasis is mine)

As you can see, this isn’t so much a how-to article as it is a thought piece. And it’s one worth reading and thinking about.