How does Googlebot see Page Content?
Wednesday, October 14, 2009 0:49
We all know Googlebot(Google’s spider/bot/crawler) sees things in a different way as compared to us. Though not very different, its important to know how your page is converted and viewed by a search engine spider. This enables us in the efficient placement of keywords on various parts of the page for better on-page Seo. Following are 12 images of Techfrog’s Seo Tips page using which’ll illustrate as to how that page gets viewed by Googlebot every time it visits to check for changes.
(You may want to keep the Seo Tips page open in another tab so as to cross check simultaneously while reading this post for better reference)
1
As soon as the ‘<head>’ section is completed, the navigation bar at the top left corner is first read.
2
The Blog Search bar at the top right is next.
3
Next is the Logo and Main Header section. If you have an image, make sure to keep your most targeted keyword within the ‘alt’ attribute of the <img> tag.
4
Lol, this is not an error(:P), this is the section to the right of the logo. Its supposed to contain something but for the time being, i’ve kept it empty.
5
Now comes the turn of the main content, placed in a container to the left side of the page. The content/text here is read line wise, like how we humans do, from left to right till the bottom, this process carries on till where the next image shows.
6
The text is read till the last line before moving again back to the top right section of the page as shown in the next image.
7
After reading the content, its back to the top-right section again.
8
Next it moves to the ‘recent posts’ section of the right sidebar.
Now, if you notice the page. The sidebar is divided into two, ‘polls’ followed by ‘Random Posts’ to the left and login, ‘Born on this day’ and ‘News and Updates’ to the right.
9
As I said before, the rule is ‘Left To Right’, hence Googlebot selects the left sidebar i.e. sidebar 1 first consisting of ‘Polls’, ‘Random Posts’ and ‘Related Posts’.
10
Now after the completion of sidebar1, it moves to the right sidebar i.e. sidebar2 consisting of ‘Login/Register’, ‘Born On This Day’ and ‘News And Updates’.
11
Next is the Subscription widget, which is the last part of the sidebar.
12
Finally is the turn of the footer, which is the bottom-most segment, keywords placed here supposedly hold less value than if placed in other places of the page.
Hope this post cleared up a few doubts as to how Search Engine bots see content on pages. Another thing i’d like to mention, the spiders/bots see all text, no images. About the images, only the ‘img’ tags and ‘alt’,'caption’ attribute is seen, bots are blind to colors and graphics.
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Klaus @ TechPatio says:
October 14th, 2009 at 2:16 AM
Another fun way of playing a search crawler bot, is to turn off images and javascript in your browser – try to search the web like that and see what life as a bot must be like, hehe.
Sam Fish says:
October 14th, 2009 at 8:22 PM
Haha, i just tried it. Browsing without javascript and images is boring indeed. Nice article, liked the way you’ve illustrated.
blogging boy says:
October 15th, 2009 at 4:01 PM
I just came over from tycoonblogger and your blog looks cool
Techfrog says:
October 15th, 2009 at 4:34 PM
Thanks for the +ve comment ‘blogging boy’.
Rajesh Kanuri says:
October 16th, 2009 at 4:43 PM
interesting post…
karan says:
November 6th, 2009 at 2:29 PM
I did not have a full idea about google bot earlier. After reading your valuable post I grasped clear understanding about it. Great work. Thanks for sharing info. Keep writing more useful articles.