What is Page Segmentation?

There is a general notion towards page segmentation. For most search engines, this has been done mainly to reduce levels of noise in a page. In other words, page segmentation is a study technique devised by search engines to calculate the importance or relevance of a page to the web. Noise levels are calculated based on the amount of information contained in a website. Segments of the page that contain little or no information to offer readers are considered as noise and therefore not important. An example is a navigation block, which is used by many website owners to drive traffic to their sites. Most of these block have very little to do with the keyword. Search engines do not use these blocks to determine the rank of that page.

A simple example of this can be described when reading segments such as ‘privacy policy’ and ‘about us’ on a website. Such sections do not really determine what a page is about and are therefore irrelevant according to search engines. Website owners can reduce the noise levels by reducing content that is not relevant and will therefore not contribute towards a better rankings. Search engines use page segmentation to determine just how much of the content on a page is relevant and how much is merely for generating traffic. However, this task can be very daunting because not many pages can be described as being focused on just one topic. In addition, page segmentation sometimes will not tell advertisements apart from the content itself. Advertisements and search results for 3rd parties can increase the noise level of a page erroneously.

To ensure that page segmentation helps web users as opposed to increasing their noise levels, search engines pair up this analysis with behavioral metrics and link analysis. This can help website owners achieve their desired ranking and reduce their noise levels. Page segmentation analysis treats a page as one regardless of the links that are in it. The links may be to content that is either related or completely irrelevant to the search query. If page segmentation included both internal and external links, page owners could achieve their rankings by linking their pages to other pages that have related content.

Another factor would be enabling website owners to build links towards a page with related content. This page will have many different anchor texts and will therefore reduce noise levels. Many search engines have a problem determining if a page is SEO ready or whether it is good for business. Page segmentation enables users to build their links towards a provided main category page that contains related content. Page segmentation also calculates relevance based on the content in one particular block in relation to the entire page. If it was determined from one page to another, users would have higher chances of being ranked as relevant. The impact of page segmentation on SEO is not clear. Content providers should therefore focus their most relevant content and keywords in their title tags to ensure that their sites are not termed irrelevant.