Evaluating Content on a Web Page

Search engines place a lot of weight on the content of each web page. After all, it is this content that defines what a page is about, and the search engines do a detailed analysis of each web page they find during their crawl to help make that determination.You can think of this as the search engine performing a detailed analysis of all the words and phrases that appear on a web page, and then building a map of that data for it to consider showing your page in the results when a user enters a related search query.

This map, often referred to as a semantic map, seeks to define the relationships between those concepts so that the search engine can better understand how to match the right web pages with user search queries.



If there is no semantic match of the content of a web page to the query, the page has a much lower possibility of showing up. Therefore, the words you put on the page, and the “theme” of that page, play a huge role in ranking.

FIGURE 2-14.

Figure 2-14 shows how a search engine will break up a page when it looks at it, using a page on the Stone Temple Consulting website. The navigational elements of a web page are likely similar across the many pages of a site. These navigational elements are not ignored, and they do play an important role, but they do not help a search engine determine what the unique content is on a page. To do that, the search engine gets very focused on the part of Figure 2-14 that is labeled “Real content”.

Determining the unique content on a page is an important part of what the search engine does. It is this understanding of the unique content on a page that the search engine uses to determine the types of search queries for which the web page might be relevant. Since site navigation is generally not unique to a single web page, it does not help the search engine with that task.

This does not mean navigation links are not important, because they most certainly are—however, they simply do not count when trying to determine the unique content of a web page because those navigation links are shared among many web pages.

One task the search engines face is judging the value of content. Although evaluating how the community responds to a piece of content using link analysis is part of the process, the search engines can also draw some conclusions based on what they see on the page.

For example, is the exact same content available on another website? Is the unique content the search engine can see two sentences long or 500+ words long? Does the content repeat the same keywords excessively? These are a few examples of things that the search engine can look at when trying to determine the value of a piece of content.