: Dynamically PHP-generated content and SEO So I'm using a function in my functions.php file to add some text to all my posts. I was wondering if that will be used by Google when it indexes
So I'm using a function in my functions.php file to add some text to all my posts. I was wondering if that will be used by Google when it indexes my website, and how that will affect my SEO ratings. That is, if the text is, for example, "cute dogs and puppies" added by functions.php to all your posts, will that affect how high your link appears in a Google search?
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That would depend on several things. For example, are cute puppy dogs relevant to the topic? Is it placed high in the content or low in the content in the middle of a paragraph? Are you placing it in the header or footer?
What people seem to miss is that Google and indeed any search engine these days, but especially Google, is a semantic based text search utility engine. This means that it is not operating in a linear fashion like a parser would, though there is some aspect to it that is similar, but rather a semantic engine that finds links (not HTML links) within content that allows it to index and understand the content in more scientific ways so that a search intent match can be made. This is done by matching text within a single page and across all your pages and even across all websites and discovering patterns within the semantic links. Part of the process is looking at web pages in blocks. If you placed your cute puppy dogs within well known blocks such as a header or footer or sidebar, it might likely be relatively ignored since it is not uncommon that off topic content can appear within these blocks. However, within content space, these terms would be more closely scrutinized. If your cute puppy dogs is high within the content it will be seen as more important than low in the content with some exception for closing statements top of topic blocks and so on. If this is repeated across all pages and does not appear to match the linguistics or topic, then it will be weighed differently and a possible pattern match may pick up on this.
Please understand that Google's anti-spam platform uses semantic link pattern evaluations heavily and has been very effective over the past few years. Because Google is far less parser than semantic engine, the notion of keywords and density and whether any form of manipulation could effectively work is moot. Anything that would appear to work, would only work for a period of time until it got discovered which would happen eventually since the entire web is used as a baseline to semantically weigh your site. One of the most famous uses of semantics to find abuses on the Internet was when J.C. Penny hired a company that intentionally created links that would weigh obscure terms to J.C. Penny products. The traditional anti-spam methods that Google used did not pick up on this, but semantics did. This technique is applied to content as well as HTML mark-up and can easily pick up on oddities such as this. In other words, the technique is native to content and mark-up equally since there is no distinction except for applying weight. Another story was where a car site author wrote colorful posts where a particular patterns of speech was not realized until Google picked up on it. There were semantic links created between car colors and interior materials and other lesser topic elements and searches for dresses and shoes began to rank his site higher returning dissatisfied visitors to his site and radically increasing his bounce rate. It was a subtle use of language repeated enough times that skewed results.
Is it wise to intentionally manipulate a search engine? No. Can it still be done? Yes. For a while. It took 2 years for Google catch J.C. Penny and it only happened when semantics was being used in a wider fashion as a part of Panda. J.C. Penny was used as an example by delisting the site for the holiday shopping season. Semantics was always a part of Google from the very first academic paper written and has been instrumental in how Google works being more and more widely used in all facets of it's operations. I suggest being careful.
In fact, my advice for as much as 8 years, is to be natural and not to try and keyword manipulate search engines. The reason for this is simple. You get better results. Yes. You do want to send appropriate signals in the right places, and there are only a few left, but if you chose to use keywords that are not appropriate for your site, even mistakenly, the results these days is dramatic. With the entire web as a baseline, if you chose to use terms to push your site in specific directions, be careful, you just might get what you want! And your site will suffer for it.
It depends where the words are used, how often they appear in the webpage and how they are arranged compared to what a user looks for.
For example, if you use the words "cute dogs and puppies" in that exact order, and someone searches for "puppies and dogs that are cute" then the odds of the search engine finding your page will be lower because of the word arrangement.
Also, if the phrase does not appear often, then search engines might ignore it. If the phrase appears excessively, then search engines might take action against your site since you're trying to rank with excessive keywords.
To make sure you're ok, use a keyword density analyzer on a page with the phrases you want already inserted in the page and make sure the most important phrase doesn't appear more than 5% of the time in the document.
I like textalyser.net since it can measure this as well as prominence which means how important search engines would see a set of words.
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