August 2018 Newsletter
Summary
We are changing the phone number for our support line. Read on for tips on implementing the Main element in your html pages.
Program Update
New Phone Number for Customer Support
We have changed our contact number for customer support. If you need help, from now on call us at
202-969-7426
We’ve updated the phone number in the Admin Center help menu, on our website, etc. The previous phone number will be turned off at the end of August.
SEO Pro Tip
Use a Main element to tell search engines where the real content is on your pages
We often get questions about whether we’ll index the text of headers and other navigation elements along with the primary content of a page. When a search engine loads a page, it will try to ignore all that redundant text and focus on the main content of the page. It does this by looking for a main element. There are two ways you can implement the main element:
<body>Redundant header code and navigation elements, sidebars, etc.<main><h1>This is your page title</h1><p>This is the main text of your page</main>Redundant footer codeVarious scripts, etc.</body>
Or
<body>Redundant header code and navigation elements, sidebars, etc.<div role="main"><h1>This is your page title</h1><p>This is the main text of your page</div>Redundant footer codeVarious scripts, etc.</body>
Note that the div’s role is main, not the id, name, or other attribute.
In the absence of a main element, search engines will grab the full <body> tag, which would then mean that your header, footer, and navigation text would be indexed along with the “meat” of the page.
Be sure you’ve wrapped the correct content in the main element. One site we indexed recently had done the following, which meant that we only indexed the title of their page:
<main><h1>This is your page title</h1></main><p>This is the main text of your page
Hear more about other website-side things you can do to improve indexing of your websites in our recent webinar:
How Search Engines Index Your Websites
Indexing Update
- We added support for XML sitemaps that are located in non-standard locations within a domain.
- We can now follow all 301 redirects, both server side and client side.
- We increased the maximum document size to 15MB, up from 10MB.
- PDF demotion has been delayed, due to query time performance. We want to be sure your search results stay fast.
Release Notes
Want to learn about the latest features, fixes, and focuses of the Search team? We post monthly Release Notes on our website.