Google reading from bottom to top?

How does google spider a site...

[Phil_AM]

Good morning all! First-time poster here. I'd just like to say thanks to everyone here for providing wonderful commentary and great info!

Here's my question:

Is it possible that Google could read a website from bottom to top? It seems that the info on my site, relevant to Keyword EXAMPLE, is more targeted at the top of the page, but in the google description its grabbing info from the bottom of the page.

Anyone thoughts?

[Bonusbana]

Welcome to Webmasterworld

I believe the google description depends on what search term you use. So if you search for a keyword frequently present at the bottom of your site, it might look like the bot has crawled from the bottom.

I dont know if the bot crawls from the bottom but somehow I have a hard time believing it does.

[Nuttakorn]

I think it is impossible to read from bottom to top because the most program or spider always read it line by line from the first line to the end. You can try by creating a page which are over 101K , then when those page has been cached, you will not see a full page which you have created. You will see from top and the bottom may lost some content. The reason google is indexed only 101K.

[Phil_AM]

Thanks guys!

[dickbaker]

Phil_AM's question is interesting to me. Google has indexed a couple hundred pages of my 1400-1500 page site. Many of the page descriptions contain the copyright and disclaimer language which is at the very bottom, but does not contain the body copy. I've never seen G do this before.

[steveb]

Click the "cached text" link of the cached page. Is the footer text pulled up to the top?

[trader]

We have a number of sites where the Google search information indexed is the extreme page bottom, especially the copyright notice and any disclaimer at the bottom.

This is very odd in that all the important targeted content is ignored and all G cares about is the non-relevant content at the bottom.

This is nothing new at all (as someone else asked), and G has been doing this as far back as I remember (2 or more yrs). It also has nothing to do with the search words used (as someone else said) as my key search words are not located near the extreme page bottom.

Is it any wonder those websites do not rank very well? Anyone know why or what can be done about this?

[GravityFree]

I would try using the google nosnippet meta tag. I never understood why google was not using my description meta tag or the content on my site and using that footer credit stuff. I just recently switched and am waiting for the new dance to see the results.

Another trick I have found is to get your pages and inbound links to point to your root page instead of your url. for example. www.gravityfree.com/index.cfm instead of www.gravityfree.com. this gives me an additional ranking page. put in sarasota web design and see.

[zomega42]

Did you use a HTML validator on these pages where only the bottom snippets are showing? Maybe you are forgetting to close a table, or some other little thing like that and it makes google think that the bottom stuff is really at the top.

[Pass the Dutchie]

Google spiders a site in a linear motion, going through your html from left to right and works its way down the page as if it were reading it like a book. Usually it places more emphasis on key phrases at the top of your html source.
I would assume that you either had an issue with your code or you had some important keywords in your footer.

[DerekH]

GravityFree, you shouldn't include information in your post that leads people to your website, as it's against our Terms of Service.

If you can tolerate a tongue-in-cheek remark too, you ought to be careful pointing this community to a site which trumpets your being a premier web designer, because I just checked your home page to the HTML validator - you need to fix some of the errors!
</tongue-in-cheek-remark>

DerekH