In a Duda webinar, Martin Splitt explained a concept called Centerpiece Annotation, which discusses how Google analyzes content on a web page.
I’m not going to repeat the question because it’s somewhat off-topic and lengthy.
Martin, on the other hand, discusses how Google separates out the boilerplate of a web page and then summarizes what the web page is about from the text content structure.
He mentions something known as the Centerpiece Annotation.
Martin Splitt elaborated:
“That’s just us analyzing the content and, I don’t know what we have publicly said about this, but I think I brought it up in one of the podcasts episodes.
So I can probably say that we have a thing called the Centerpiece Annotation, for instance, and there’s a few other annotations that we have where we look at the semantic content, as well as potentially the layout tree.
But fundamentally we can read that from the content structure in HTML already and figure out so “Oh! This looks like from all the natural language processing that we did on this entire text content here that we got, it looks like this is primarily about topic A, dog food.”
Martin then discusses how the page analysis divides the web page into component parts, some of which are unrelated to the Centerpiece.
He explains that different parts of the page are weighted differently. The term “weighting” refers to how important a page element is. So, if a section receives a low weighting score, it is not as important as one that receives a higher weighting score.
Martin went on:
“And then there’s this other thing here, which seems to be like links to related products but it’s not really part of the centerpiece. It’s not really main content here. This seems to be additional stuff.
And then there’s like a bunch of boilerplate or, “Hey, we figured out that the menu looks pretty much the same on all these pages and lists. This looks pretty much like that menu that we have on all the other pages of this domain,” for instance, or we’ve seen this before. We don’t even actually go by domain or like, “Oh, this looks like a menu.”
We figure out what looks like boilerplate and then, that gets weighted differently as well.”
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Off-topic Content Receives Less Attention
Martin then discusses how, once Google has determined what a web page is about if a section is off-topic, that section is not given as much consideration, presumably for ranking purposes.
Martin elaborates:
“So if you happen to have content on a page that is not related to the main topic of the rest of the content, we might not give it as much of a consideration as you think.
We still use that information for the link discovery and figuring out your site structure and all of that.
But if a page has 10,000 words on dog food and then 3000 or 2000 or 1000 words on bikes, then probably this is not good content for bikes.”
That’s really interesting because it appears to show that when Google determines what a page is about, off-topic content may not have a chance to rank or, as Martin puts it, is not given “as much of a consideration.”
Jason Barnard inquired:
“So that sounds to me like you’re guessing the semantic HTML5. Does semantic HTML5e give you any help or do you just not care? There’s no point?”
What Jason was referring to was the HTML5 markup that defines the various sections of a web page, such as the header, navigation, and footer.
Martin mentioned analyzing the content structure and the actual text at the start of his discussion. So the discussion has now veered slightly into the semantic structure of HTML5.
Martin responded:
“It does help us, but it’s not the only thing that we look for. Yes.”
Annotation for the Centerpiece
An annotation is a brief explanation of something. A centerpiece is something that is meant to be the focus of attention.
A centerpiece annotation appears to be a summary of the main content’s topic.
Martin explains how Google divides the page into sections and weights the sections other than the centerpiece annotation differently.
He also mentions how parts of a page that aren’t related to the main topic aren’t given much thought, which suggests that it might not be content that can rank.
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