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All of what you said the website doesn't do is exactly what a decent website shouldn't need to. Google should index it according to the user-visible content, no
by dingo_bat 8y ago
All of what you said the website doesn't do is exactly what a decent website shouldn't need to. Google should index it according to the user-visible content, not hidden metadata.
- tgtweak 8y agoGoogle does crawl "the way you see it" and not via raw html parsing. They interpret JavaScript and CSS. Try putting display:none on a div with some text in it, or putting the font-size to 1px. It will not rank for that and you will probably trigger a penalty of some sort if it's egregious.
- nkozyra 8y agoInvisible or near invisible text can be discerned without rendering the page. Google does execute JavaScript but as best people can tell it doesn't happen all the time, just periodically. It would be computationally expensive to do this for every request on every spider view for every web site.
- tgtweak 8y agoLess than encoding millions of hours of video per day? Libchromium is quite fast and Google has lots of resources for this. They had rendered screenshots of every result with the matching section highlighted... almost 5 years ago.
- nkozyra 8y agoI'm not saying they don't do it - everyone knows they do. I'm saying for many, many cases there's no reason for them to do it for every page and every site.
- user5994461 8y agoMetadata defines what is the content, the sections and the titles. A blob of text is worthless without context.
- smt88 8y agoHTML pages (written properly) don't need metadata for that. It's part of the document. Metadata is good for things like thumbnails, authorship, or summaries, none of which are necessarily distinguishable in valid HTML.
- user5994461 8y agoYou're conflating metadata with the HTML meta tag. Please consider that everything is metadata except the bare text. The point of the message above us was that the content on this site is not formatted properly as HTML.
- smt88 8y agoTags aren't just meta. For example, a sentence has a different meaning when it's alone vs. part of a list vs. a caption of an image. All of those things have their own tags.
- user5994461 8y agoWe are saying the same thing.