Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
My site has a header, menu, contentarea, and footer. Google crawls the menu first, which make it look really ugly when doing a site:mysite.com
Does this mean google places first emphasis on the menu item text not on the keyword rich content? How do I make it read the content first?
google renders the description like this: (edited for TOS)
The name of my Site. Home. MenuItem1; ; MenuItem2; Menuitem3; ETC ETC ETC ...
Adding a custom meta description tag solved this, but my worry is google still crawls the menu first, treating it as the "top content" instead of my REAL content.
I use CSS to put my menu after my headers, main content and such. I like having my menu in the left column and CSS was the solution for me.
Yes, sometimes in the site: results, the snippet selection takes a holiday when a page doesn't have any meta description at all, or even not a strong and unique meta description. IMO, this is mostly because the snippet presented is search-term-dependent, and there's no keyword intelligence in the basic site: operator query. Just because you see an ugly snippet in the site: results doesn't mean the same snippet gets shown in a regular keyword search.
one closing remark about the thread title -- this
question is not about crawling, it's about indexing.
Googlebot can only "crawl" content in the document's
source code order. Then begins the indexing and the
ranking analysis.
True, its indexing.
Essentially, re-ordering the source code is a technical trick, right? If you were a search engine, wouldn't you try to find better ways to ferret out relevance? The algos have matured a long way.
That said, getting important keywords in early in the content block is still a big deal.
[edited by: tedster at 6:23 am (utc) on Jan. 6, 2007]
Google had understood and recognized and dealt with page templates for years. I don't worry about it anymore.
<flamebait>
But for those of you that go on about CSS being the answer, it is easier to put your content before your left sidebar using tables than with CSS and have it display consistently. Rowspan is your friend.
</flamebait>
Yes, sometimes in the site: results, the snippet selection takes a holiday when a page doesn't have any meta description at all
With the site results, if the meta description is less than 50 characters, it will pull additional text from the first text it sees.
With normal search results, if the meta description is less than 50 characters, it will pull additional text from what it feels best shows what you're searching for.
Earlier i was having less pages in my site, so at that time links were or right side and appeared after content text in the code.
Later i created more pages so i created a top navigation section, which appeared before content text in code.
My traffic decreased a lot.
I was getting supplemental results.
Then i move the code for top navigation below the text in code, by using some special coding.
Appearance of page remained same but coding changed.
Now everything is fine.
Other thing you can do is by using meta description tag, but i wouldn't recommend it.
[edited by: Patrick_Taylor at 5:09 pm (utc) on Jan. 6, 2007]
I have nothing against CSS, and I use it a lot. I just find it funny that people insist that it is the only way to do things or that it always produces smaller pages.
Redesigning a table based page to CSS is a lot of work for little gain. Source ordering your table will take about 2 minutes, and produce identical output to what is currently there with a different source order. And it works the same in all browsers.
Google doesn't appear to care too much either way, and I tend to agree that the order of the source code is not a factor.
