4 replies to this topic

[globi]

I have recently written a blog post about how Google is scraping content in order to rank it:
www[.]globi.ca/blog/google_is_scraping_your_website_to_rank_it

In short, Google may no longer be looking at source HTML at all anymore. Since you get a site preview in the results which even highlight the text that caused the ranking in a graphical fashion, I can only assume that Google uses the scraped content to rank sites.

This now makes it impossible to stuff keywords into divs which are not quite visible, or other tricks. Google KNOWS what the page renders like, and therefore can do a much better job of ranking the content like a human would.

Didn't Jill's last email refer to dropped rankings for content in accordians that wasn't immediately visible? This would explain it.

It may soon also affect cheating like making small H1's for the SE's, and larg SPAN's for humans. Google will likely look at text size and contrast and decide from a rendering perspective, what is bigger, what stands out most, and therefore what is most importnat.

I would be very interested in what others think on this topic.

Cheers,
-Andreas

Edited by chrishirst, 17 October 2011 - 05:27 PM.

[chrishirst]

I can only assume that Google uses the scraped content to rank sites.

Well, seeing how "scraping" involves reading the HTML source to get the content, how else would you think that search engines get the information??

And it's not that difficult to create a "preview image" from the source code. Though before you wrote your "expose" of Google "scraping" MAYBE you should have read this

Q: When are Instant Preview images generated?
A: We mostly generate preview images based on content we’ve crawled with Googlebot. When we don’t have a cached preview image (which primarily happens when we can’t fetch the contents of important resources), we may choose to create a preview image on-the-fly based on a user’s request.

from here

Research into whatever you intend to write is important so you do not get it wrong and look a complete muppet!!!

[globi]

Thanks for your comments.

You are correct in that generating a preview image is easy.

What's NOT EASY AT ALL, is generating a preview image with a red box around very specific text and annotating this in text balloons to the right. This takes interpretation of what was rendered.

[chrishirst]

And you don't think that Google's software developers are capable of that? Having a rendering engine that can highlight words before sending the output to something like the GD library.


They have this thing called the "Google toolbar" that has a "highlight search words" button which simply injects styling into the DOM.

Creating the preview with or without highlights is the "hello world" programming for the level of developers that Google employ.

Edited by chrishirst, 20 October 2011 - 02:44 AM.

[Jill]

I've always been of the belief that the underlying code of any page has very little to do with how Google determines its relevancy to any given keyword search query.

So I don't see this preview thing as being anything different or new in terms of determining the relevancy of a page.