Content on top for better search results and PageRank

Browsing around on Flickr, I came upon a pretty funny screen shot of a Google search ‘ver­lee’.

So many people mis­spell my name on my blog that Google now rewards me for this by mak­ing Verlee also a top res­ult :-D
Originally uploaded by Veerle Pieters.

It reminded me of a funny thing I dis­covered just last week. A search for ‘Palau de les Arts Reina Sofía’ gets me the 4th spot, while I’m only point­ing to Veerle’s art­icle about it. The art­icle it self comes way below that at #12, on the 2nd page.

Why is that so weird? Veerle’s PageRank is 7, while mine is 6!

So what could be caus­ing that? It can’t be the xHTML doc­type and it can’t be the incom­ing links (she’s bound to have WAY more). So I star­ted look­ing at the source of the respect­ive pages. Mine has the con­tent right up there after (the min­imal) nav­ig­a­tion, while Veerle has the whole side­bar in first, before the content.

Although there’d have to be more detailed test­ing, I feel it’s safe to say that put­ting con­tent first — in your source code — is a good idea regard­ing your search engine rank­ing, espe­cially as it’s sup­posed to be more access­ible to screen readers.

This is also the reason I don’t have a ‘skip to con­tent’ button.

On: Web • 4th December of 2005 • Comments are closed.