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Article | Source Ordered Content: SEO Benefits (and Drawbacks?)

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Saved by 1 people (0 private), first by anonymouse user on 2008-10-14


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Highlighted by suzannah

on 2008-10-14 by suzannah

Smarty, Ann. 2008. Source Ordered Content: SEO Benefits (and Drawbacks?). Blog. Search Engine Journal. July 28. http://www.searchenginejournal.com/source-ordered-content-seo-beneits-and-drawbacks/7334/.

Sometimes it’s very useful to return to basics and refine good old SEO techniques you might forget. SOC (”source ordered content” or “front-loading”) is one such technique that basically incorporates placing content as close to the beginning of the page as possible and using CSS to display page elements where they “belong”.

Highlighted by suzannah

Here is a very simple example: that’s what you see at the top of a very popular blog: (1) head (+ (2) navigation) => (3) left column => (4) content => (5) right column - that’s the way it is displayed:

Highlighted by suzannah

SOC example 1

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So we expect to see content block going after the left column in the page source…. but instead we see content much closer to the top, right after the head navigation (you can also check that with SEO browser):

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SOC example 2

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Source ordered content is especially useful for SEO because:

  • it allows to give prominence to keyword-optimized sections of your site (e.g. content above the navigation);
  • it allows to show spiders unique page elements first - before sitewide elements (e.g. article before sitewide navigation);
  • it allows to place search crawlable elements above blocks that are ignored by search bots (e.g. content above flash or javascript elements).

Highlighted by suzannah

The benefits of this technique include:

  • no “undesired” elements (e.g. navigation, paging, etc) being shown as a snippet in the search results;
  • important and informative content loads first (lower bounce rate from slow page loads);
  • better rankings (priority is given to that content that resides directly after the <body> element).

Highlighted by suzannah

The only downside (I never felt myself but heard other webmasters report) includes some cross-browser compatibility issues. Can you think of any more method drawbacks? I would be eager to learn about them.

Highlighted by suzannah

Once again thanks for your post. It is really very informative.

I am not sure about the disadvantages.

Even I have a site in which the navigation bar has many links(its a drop down menu) because of this the content gets pushed down to the bottom of the html page. Even i was thinking the same solution for it. Except home page in other pages placing the navigation menu after the content (using CSS) really am not sure if it is possible or not, lets see.

Highlighted by suzannah

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