SEO Page Segmentation is fragmenting a web page into many blocks to facilitate deeper search engine analysis. Page Segmentation is used by search engines to determine the relevance of each block individually and assign levels of importance accordingly.
The purpose behind SEO Page Segmentation is to relegate irrelevant or less relevant segments and promote in the hierarchy the segments that pertinently respond to the surfer’s search query.
Need for SEO Page Segmentation
Many web pages invariably contain more than one topical block and the rest may include navigation bars, headings, footers, advertisements, and content that may refer to other pages on a site. Page Segmentation analysis helps a search engine spider to easily distinguish and focus on the true merit of a web page and disregard the less relevant or irrelevant content.
For instance, one segment commonly found on most web pages is the navigation block. While it is acceptable that navigation blocks are necessary to point search engine spiders to a web site’s internal pages, it is hardly relevant to the basic content of a webpage. Likewise, all generic terms - “About Us”, “Privacy Policy”, “Contact”, “TOS” – may not be wholly dispensable, but do not enhance the value addition or usefulness of a web page.
Analyzing webpage content further, it is a fact that many web pages tend to carry multiple items – advertisement, banner ads, sponsored links, third party provided search results, article directory index pages and text excerpts - which from the search engines point of view does not meaningfully contribute to the exact webpage content.
Types of SEO Page Segmentation
Broadly speaking, there are four types of SEO page segmentation - Fixed Length Page Segmentation (FixedPS), Dom Based Page Segmentation (DomPS), Vision Based Page Segmentation (VIPS) and Combine Page Segmentation (CombPS).
FixedPS has a lot to do with the length of text found on any page. The search engines may not favor this method as if all the html tags are removed, it might as well discount all links including some important SEO factors. It may however be said that any links that are placed on the top, bottom or side of a website will not be rated highly as the ones in the actual content of the page.
DomPS will factor in web titles and all other tags and tables whenfragmenting the website into segmented blocks. It is an undeniable fact that most sites layouts are created with tables and by this method the page would not be broken up in the right manner. The use of tables for the layout will distort this type of page segmentation and the results will not be quite fair.
By VIPS method, one can clearly discern how the search engines would view the web page and split up into different blocks. Each block is assigned a number to represent the content held within it and with social media sites or an e-commerce website, the content held within these blocks are split down even further because they are links to read more about that story or product.
By each segment and sub segment receiving a point value, these points will determine which segment will be given the most value by any given search engine.
CombPS deploys a combination of techniques and the first step for a search engine would be to use vision based page segmentation to separate the content on any given page The second step would be to use the fixed length page segmentation to analyze the data in each block.
Conclusion
Simplistically stated, a block located in the center of a page might be viewed more important than another block found at the bottom of a page. Thus, different kinds of blocks will be rated with different values.
Hypothetically speaking, an advertisement or copyright notice might be given a score of 1; Navigation or directory information might be accorded a score of 2; Information that is relevant to primary topic but not wholly relevant such as “related topics” and “topic indexes” might be given a score of 3; The headline or the main content might be given a value of 4.
Reference:
4 Types of Page Segmentation and Toward Page Segmentation SEO. Read these articles for more pragmatic understanding. Also read SEO Web Page Fragmentation
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