{"id":382,"date":"2004-08-14T01:50:40-04:00","date_gmt":"2004-08-14T09:50:40+00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peterjanes.ca\/wordpress\/?p=382"},"modified":"2006-11-27T07:28:48-05:00","modified_gmt":"2006-11-27T12:28:48+00:00","slug":"silly-expert-experiment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterjanes.ca\/blog\/2004\/08\/14\/silly-expert-experiment\/","title":{"rendered":"Silly expert experiment"},"content":{"rendered":"

Can anyone confirm that engines like Google actually make use of heading elements in determining page rank? I’m looking for a link to actual results demonstrating the effect of headings on Google’s ranking of a page; if you have one handy, kindly drop it to me via e-mail. I’d just like to know one way or the other.<\/p><\/blockquote>\r\n \r\n

No existing results here, but it sounds like a fun experiment along the lines of nigritude ultramarine<\/a>. So here’s what I’ve done: I’ve created a three-word term that’s not currently found in Google (and which I won’t include here so as to not skew the results). It’s embedded in different ways in five randomly-named and titled<\/a> XHTML 1.0 Strict<\/a> files that contain only Lipsum text<\/a>:<\/p>\r\n \r\n

    \r\n
  1. as an <h1><\/code> at the top of a page<\/li>\r\n
  2. as <h1><\/code> within a page<\/li>\r\n
  3. as an <h2><\/code> within a page<\/li>\r\n
  4. split between <h1><\/code> and <h2><\/code> elements<\/li>\r\n
  5. as the entire contents of a <p><\/code><\/li>\r\n
  6. embedded in the middle of a paragraph as normal text<\/li>\r\n<\/ol>\r\n \r\n

    The pages are linked in random order from a single page<\/a>. If heading elements do help to determine page rank, one would expect the pages to be ranked in the order I’ve listed them above.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

    Although I’ve tried to reduce bias as much as possible in the test, it’s not exhaustive and hardly scientific. I’m open to any suggestions on how to improve the method.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

    (In case you’re wondering, the phrase was chosen by taking words from webpages I had open at the time and adding a descriptive adjective. J.<\/cite> is a fellow Lenni Jabour fan and the host of a radio program in Toronto, and M.<\/cite> is the name of a show being put on by former Lenni cohort Andrew Downing.)<\/p>\r\n\r\n

    Bleah. While checking to see if Google had crawled the pages–it has–I discovered that I forgot to link the very first item in the list above. I’ve added it now and re-requested a crawl, but it may skew the results. (The term doesn’t appear in search results as of yet, so I have some hope it may not matter.)<\/ins><\/p><\/div>

    <\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Eric Meyer suggests what sounds like a fun search-engine experiment. So here’s what I’ve done…","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"mf2_syndication":[],"venue_id":0},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"kind":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterjanes.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/382"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterjanes.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterjanes.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterjanes.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterjanes.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=382"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/peterjanes.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/382\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterjanes.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=382"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterjanes.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=382"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterjanes.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=382"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}