: Do search engines use the id's and classes of HTML elements as clues? This is more for interest sake than anything else, since I assume it will make very little difference, but I was wondering

@Caterina187

Sorry but I don't have time to find the link at the moment but I came across something recently saying id's can be indexed in HTML5, so it might depend on the doctype, but I think it is more relevant now than in the past.

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@Lengel546

I don't think so because that would bring about a lot of false positives. I suspect they could have some advanced method where they detect the most immediate element/parent of text nodes and another advanced algorithm to see if the name/id corresponds with a list such as ['content', 'main-content'].

But seeing as how every site has a different id/name and some sites even lack it, I don't think they rely on that as much, if not at all.

You should always use the most semantic/meaningful value for an id/class anyway, regardless of what the SE/spider does. It would absolutely not make sense for an SE/spider to devalue/demerit solely based on the id/class value changing or not being a certain value.

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