SEO & Page Segmentation Analysis

Jan 9, 2009 at 2:03pm ET by Matt McGee

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.

Matt McGee is the Search Engine Land Assignment Editor, and offers search marketing consulting and training to businesses of all sizes. He blogs at Small Business Search Marketing and HyperlocalBlogger.com.

See more articles by Matt McGee >

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theGypsy, January 9th, 2009 at 5:35 pm ET:

Hi Matt… thanks for the mention. This stuff has been floating around awhile now and I just thought that since each of the big three have had related patents and papers out on it over the years, it was worth looking at again (as Bill, Rand, Barry have done so in the past). There are many advantageous to these types of approaches as more than a few signals could be had… all in all, worth thinking about.

I noticed the Yahoo mention, after I wrote the piece someone Twittered me about Microsoft Slices for IE8;

http://www.mmmeeja.com/blog/semantic-web/hslice-microformat.html

http://blog.jonudell.net/2008/03/05/webslices-can-help-popularize-feed-syndication/

Not sure if the initiative is related at this point, but interesting none the less.

Have a great weekend.

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