tedster - 6:47 am on Jan 21, 2008 (gmt 0)

What is obvious is that words near the top of the file often get used for the snippet when there is no meta description.

Now, does that mean that near-the-top also gets extra weight from the ranking algo? I think it used to, very much, but today, not so much and possibly not at all. Today's algo is more complex in many ways, and Google's snippet team functions separately from the "relevance" team that works on the ranking algo.

For example, Google (and the other majors SEs as well) can analyze a page in terms of content blocks. So even though the snippet team may plug the top menu choices into the snippet (wish they would stop that) the relevance algo can pull out just the content area and look at that "unit" separate from the navigation, the footer, and so on.

So within the content block alone, does near-the-top get some extra juice? Hard to say. There can be all kinds of "pre-head" text that really doesn't mean much to the search algo - branding and marketing blah-blah-blah and that kind of thing. I'm thinking that an early line of text - one that reinforces or partially echos the title element - can help out. But other kinds of text in the same spot will not get a boost just because of its position in the source code.

So I'd say it's more of a holistic picture today, especially when you use a well structured page template with clean semantic mark-up. If your View Source is more like code soup, and if it varies significantly from page to page, then you are making Google's job harder. In that case those early lines of text just "might" still get a little extra juice. But the whole site may be getting so little juuice overall that it barely matters.

Part of my thinking here also comes from noticing that source-ordered content (using CSS positioning) doesn't seem to give the same edge that it used to. I can't say I've explicitly tested this, it's just the overall sense I get from working with a lot of pages and the rankings of a lot of sites.

[edited by: tedster at 8:11 am (utc) on Jan. 21, 2008]