Why G, why?

I've heard that G gives less weight to content that is lower down on the page. This seems a bit silly to me, considering the fact that whitespace and formatting tags are taken into account.

Why does G do this? Do we HAVE to make plain sites in order to experience the SEO benefit?

Sites like WMW are very simple and as a result the KWs are higher; I never understood why G implicitly encourages this simplicity. Nowadays I see table-formatted pages with navbars on the right side (after content) just b/c of G's ranking algos.

Seems...kinda...silly...

Please correct me if I have been misinformed about any of this, but I really don't see the need for taking absolute position on a page into account. It should all be relative to what the page would look like w/o tags or whitespace.

 

css my friend, css...

 

I know, but is there any logic to this? That's my point. Even class="bleh" takes up 12 bytes - it should have no bearing on rankings, methinks. And we can no longer leave blocks of whitespace for organizational purposes. Look at bellsouth's home page for example, it's an absolute nightmare to edit, all thanks to bending over backwards for the SEs. They probably keep a whitespaced version for editing and run it through an algo to remove the WS.

It's just so unnecessary.

 

They aren't designing for the search engines: they're too big - they can be found simply by typing in the domain name. They are simply trying to make it as hard on their customers as they can*)

It's my opinion that bellsouth pages are among the worst on the internet. You can't find squat. Their pages are almost completely dynamic - everything is pulled from a dabase off one of their servers. Not that it's bad; but whoever does it really doesn't know what they're doing. Ever tried to find something on their site?

Edit

If they were designing for the search engines then their home page wouldn't look like this:

http://www.delorie.com/web/ses.cgi?url=http://www.bellsouth.com/

when viewed by a spider.

 

I mean this: http://home.bellsouth.net

Maybe they didn't go all out SEO, but they did remove the spaces.

 

And you call this desiging for seo?

http://www.delorie.com/web/ses.cgi?url=http://home.bellsouth.net//

Look at it. Scroll to the third box. See all the code? That's not conducive to good seo.

 

Their SEO should be fired! (if they in fact did SEO that site)

 

Maybe it's because G is so simple itself that it figures everyone should be!

I'm not actually sure how true it is that the further down the page, the less weight is given. My understanding is that Google only indexes 100kb max (or something like that) for a page and if your keyword/phrase wasn't in the first 100kb, then obviously it will be left out. It logically follows that you should be sure to keep all your keyphrases at the top if your page file size is going to be THAT gigantic. I may be wrong though.

Now, needless to say, it is absolute best practice to create your markup as lean as possible with external scripts and stylesheets anyway.

 

maybe G does this on purpose because it assumes the better sites will be formatted and coded more professionally...

and about the B.s. reference, I looked at the source in firefox for like two seconds because I was interested in the layout. I assumed b/c whitespace was eliminated it was conforming to SEO, but maybe that was an unwarrented assumption.

 

I think most people get rid of whitespace to attempt to speed up their pages. It's such a minimal difference compared to using good lean markup. But I guess it seems like a magic fix.

 

Sites without white space are hard to read. I hate seeing cluttered sites with no white space. (ie. WMW) Minimize your site design by using CSS instead of tables, dont sacrifice white space. Just my 2 cents.

 

Anxious.... I used the Search Engine Simulator to look at what my sites behavior... (I still have a lot to learn!)

Then I looked at what my big competitors look like...
one is like this:
Browser Check 6085 bytes
Please activate scripting Scripting must be enabled before you can continue. To enable scripting, you need to make a simple adjustment to your browser settings. Click here if you need more help with

The other one like that:
closeBlocked() 63097 bytes
function closeBlockedPUMesgBox() { document.getElementById("blockedPUMesgBox").style.display = "none"; } #blockedPUMesgBox { display:none; width:770px; background:url(/img/corners/ffffc5_br.gif)

I know these guys blow millions every month in PPC advertizing but I feel great!

 

Surley you can get keywords in the first 100kb?

 

That little utility was a great eye opener for me when I started my interest in seo and started revamping my pages - and I'm not one to use huge amounts of code. My navigation was the first thing to show up and wasn't doing me much good. Changed things around and wham! what a difference it made.

 

I just used that site to put my content MUCH higher on the page! I can't thank you enough.

Great link.

 

Just as a side note, I used to work for a company that did web development for some major international companies, and at least as of a few years ago, they could have cared less about SEO. The focus was design, friendly interface for users, and easy navigation, etc. I guess when you're that large, you buy the important keywords, and other then that, recognize you are a major brand name and people will search you out.

wendy

 

Bellsouth does not have an easy user interface, and navigation suckolas. Even their search sucks. Their website reminds me of their phone system: push this; push that, which option, push this, push that...and on and on.

You get the picture.

Even their backend systems: I've been privy to quite a few.

 

Always happy to oblige!

 

The reference was actually to whitespace in the coding - not whitespace as is seen by users. Indeed, that is best achieved with CSS.

 

Oh sure - not saying that ALL major companies care about user interface, I was simply saying that from my experience, NONE of them cared about SEO.