Importance of Unique Content Location in Source Code
-
How much does Google value placement of unique content in the source code vs where it is visually displayed? I have a case where my unqiue content visually displays high on page for the user, but in the source code the unique quality content is below duplicate type content that appear across many other domains (think e-commerce category thumbs on left side of screen and 80% right side of screen unique stuff).
I have the impression I am at a disadvantage because these pages have the unique / quality content lower in source code. Any thoughts on this?
-
Unfortunately, this issue has been up for debate over the past few years and there's no clear-cut answer. You might like to take a look at this staff-endorsed answer from 2012, which indicated that Google will look at how much unique content is above the fold. If your content is buried deep in the source code and duplicate copy comes first, then this _could _be an issue.
If you can place your unique content higher up within the source code, then this wouldn't be a bad thing, but I have suspicion that chances are there's always more pressing things to optimise.
Sorry there's no '100% yes!' on this, but IMO this has always been one of the vaguest areas of SEO; especially as we know G has become more adept at crawling in the past few years (javascript support, etc).
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
At scale way to check content in google?
Is there any tools people know about where I can verify that Google is seeing all of our content at scale. I know I can take snippets and plug them into Google to see if we are showing up, but this is very time consuming and want to know across a bulk of pages.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HashtagHustler0 -
Duplicate content but different pages?
Hi there! Im getting LOTS of "duplicate content" pages but the thing is they are different pages. My website essentially is a niche video hosting site with embedded videos from Youtube. Im working on adding personal descriptions to each video but keeping the same video title (should I re-word it from the original also? Any help?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sarevme0 -
How important is my code to text ratio on web pages?
I've been getting mixed reviews on this and I'm trying to figure out whether this is something I should be concerned with. We have a higher than recommended amount of code, relative to "content" but not by a crazy amount. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | absoauto0 -
Where to learn how best to promote content?
So now I created some really good content (with help of Egol and Peter here on moz.com) and now I need to promote it. To get it in front of authoritative sites so they hopefully will write about and link to it. I erroneously figured it would be fairly easy. I contacted two writers of a high level industry blog/magazine that previously had mentioned us in press, sent them an email with an invitation to check it out and please let me know what they thought. NO response. They probably get deluged. Anyway, I can't afford to pay a marketing company to promote it. Where can I learn how to best do this myself? The content isn't going to help anyone if no one sees it.... Thanks for any leads! Ron
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | yatesandcojewelers1 -
Main content - javascript/ajax
Hi, On most of our pages Javascript is displaying our main content, so it doesn't show up on the page source and I assume isn't being crawled by Google to the best of its ability. It's also not showing up on MOZ's page grader and crawl results, making analysis and testing harder. What's the easiest way, without having to completely redo our website, to have this content crawled by search engines and moz?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | S.S.N0 -
Diagnosing duplicate content issues
We recently made some updates to our site, one of which involved launching a bunch of new pages. Shortly afterwards we saw a significant drop in organic traffic. Some of the new pages list similar content as previously existed on our site, but in different orders. So our question is, what's the best way to diagnose whether this was the cause of our ranking drop? My current thought is to block the new directories via robots.txt for a couple days and see if traffic improves. Is this a good approach? Any other suggestions?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jamesti0 -
Duplicate Content on Blog
I have a blog I'm setting up. I would like to have a mini-about block set up on every page that gives very brief information about me and my blog, as well as a few links to the rest of the site and some social sharing options. I worry that this will get flagged as duplicate content because a significant amount of my pages will contain the same information at the top of the page, front and center. Is there anything I can do to address this? Is it as much of a concern as I am making it? Should I work on finding some javascript/ajax method for loading that content into the page dynamically only for normal browser pageviews? Any thoughts or help would be great.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | grayloon0 -
Duplicate Content Through Sorting
I have a website that sells images. When you search you're given a page like this: http://www.andertoons.com/search-cartoons/santa/ I also give users the option to resort results by date, views and rating like this: http://www.andertoons.com/search-cartoons/santa/byrating/ I've seen in SEOmoz that Google might see these as duplicate content, but it's a feature I think is useful. How should I address this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andertoons0