Page Blocks and Increased Importance of Link Distribution
We all know Google get’s smarter and smarter by the second. Doing a quick search on LinkedIn for keyword ‘engineer’ and company ‘Google’ gives you an approximate employee count of 23,814. This is not the exact number of employees but just a fun estimate using the LinkedIn search function.
Page blocks basically refers to the different sections of your website. Below is an image depicting how a normal website could look like and how the a webpage could potentially be broken down into. This is very important as Google is getting better at recognizing the purpose for each block.
(image credit: searchenginewatch.com)
If your page is clearly categorized into the different blocks, it makes Google’s life easier when trying to determine what the main content of your website is and what each blocks purpose it. But with the new websites being created, sometimes the text is not found that easily. Websites such as infinite scrolling sometimes have their content hidden by default and only going through Javascript will it then become prominent.
With the latest improvements, Google is becoming more effective at determining how Javascript and Stylesheets affect content/images and how they are displayed on a website. Therefore the links within your content have now becoming more important.
Link Distribution
The method of adding a link at the footer of the page is old-fashioned but something people still do nowadays. Google automatically deems this links as low priority and less important. The new practice is to inter-link your pages using important keywords and to relevant pages. Link them together only if it seems logical and not link ‘ways to eat healthy’ with a ‘latest technology’ page. Distribution of link juice or value now becomes less predictable.
Create Better Visibility
It is advisable to always still have an HTML version of all your content readily available for Googlebot to crawl. Other ways you could help Googlebot is with the following:
– HTML Markup for content
– Schema.org
– HTML 5 indicators for content functionality
With so m any functionalities like drop down menus and endless scrolling, Google is trying to humanize its efforts when crawling or looking at a website. This is definitely a good thing as it hopefully will provide higher quality search results for the common user.
Syndacast LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/syndacast
