HTML5 Doctor » seo

HTML5 and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

Bruce Lawson — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 14:30:58 +0000

Through our handy Ask The Doctor service, we get a lot of e-mails asking us about HTML5′s effect on Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). While we can’t answer in great detail (Messrs Google, Yahoo, Bing, and their friends haven’t sent us in-depth details of their algorithms), we’ve rounded up some useful facts from Google, the world’s most dominant search engine.

At the moment, Google indexes HTML5 microdata (more about microdata) but does not reward you for using the new HTML5 structural elements, but neither does it penalise you:

As HTML5 gains in popularity and as we recognize specific markup elements that provide value to our indexing system, this is likely to change, but at the moment I would not assume that you would have an advantage by using HTML5 instead of older variants….

Personally, I would recommend using HTML5 where you think that it already makes sense, perhaps reverting to HTML4 if you can determine that the browser won’t support the elements of HTML5 that you use properly. While this will not result in an advantage for your content in our search results, it generally wouldn’t be disadvantageous either.

Google Webmaster Central: Does semantic html5 matter to google yet

But they will take account of HTML5 once it becomes widespread, and they seem to be encouraging experimentation:

Our general strategy is to wait to see how content is marked up on the web in practice and to adapt to that. If we find that more and more content uses HTML5 markup, that this markup can give us additional information, and that it doesn’t cause problems if webmasters incorrectly use it (which is always a problem in the beginning), then over time we’ll attempt to work that into our algorithms….

HTML5 is still very much a work in progress, so it’s great to see bleeding-edge sites making use of the new possibilities

Google Webmaster Central: How well does Googlebot deal with non-standard tags?

The Doctors’ advice on SEO is to follow Google’s time-honoured guidelines: write valid, cross-browser, accessible HTML, don’t misuse markup or “cloak” with CSS, make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links, and write good content:

Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.

Google Webmaster Guidelines: Design and content guidelines

Happy New Year. May your hat remain white.

HTML5 microdata and schema.org

Added October 2011:

Schema.org is a consortium of Bing, Google and Yahoo!. On its website it says

[schema.org] provides a collection of schemas, i.e., html tags, that webmasters can use to markup their pages in ways recognized by major search providers. Search engines including Bing, Google and Yahoo! rely on this markup to improve the display of search results

schema.org uses HTML5 microdata with new elements like . So, yes: in this special case (using these markup patterns) will ensure that this HTML5 will assist search engines to categorise your content (which is not the same as guaranteeing a higher ranking, of course).

Multiple

s on a page

The new HTML5 outlining algorithm allows multiple

s in a page. We get lots of questions about whether developers will be penalised by Google which, according to myth, disallowed this.

I say “myth” because Google has always allowed multiple

s on a page, provided that it’s organic rather than trying to game the system, as this video shows:

However, don’t go too crazy with the

-only approach as it removes any hierarchy from your pages in browsers that don’t implement the outline algorithm and screenreaders that sit on top of them.

Related Posts:

The nsfw element

Extending HTML5 — Microdata

Goodbye time, datetime, and pubdate. Hello data and value.

Document Outlines

YouTube and Vimeo support HTML5 Video

HTML5 and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) originally appeared on HTML5 Doctor on January 11, 2011.

Your Questions #13

Richard Clark — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 14:15:52 +0000

The clinic is getting busy with more HTML5 ailments. This week, we’ll cover server-side validation, immutable images with , retrieving drawn objects from a , creating custom tags, the role attribute, and the effects of

on SEO.

Server-side validation

Brian asked:

We currently use PHP-Tidy to validate the HTML mark-up of content regions of our site. Our content regions have images that represent modules in our system that get translated into code for things like processing video, forms, etc. I’ve been making the move to upgrade these modules to use new HTML5 elements, but I’m finding that Tidy is stripping out these elements and I’m doing a lot of dancing around these issues right now. Are you aware of any server-side processing scripts that have been updated to work with HTML5 and perhaps with ARIA support as well?

The current contender is html5lib. The PHP version is v0.1, so YMMV.

It seems that HTML5 support won’t be coming to Tidy anytime soon.

Good luck! Peace – Oli

Immutable image with

Mike asked:

We do have a medical app and we want to use to let docs draw over a still picture. The only thing I cannot do is keep the picture unchanged when they use an “eraser” (basically a white pen). I haven’t found any example on the web so may be it’s impossible. It seems that the background image either part of the canvas of a div containing the canvas becomes part of the canvas itself. If it’s possible what’s the secret? Thanks

This is possible in a variety of ways. Here’s a quick demonstration of one of the solutions. Open the demo up in Firefox 3.6 or later, drop an image in the box, draw over it, and click the “Drawn image as PNG” button to retrieve what you drew (without the background image).

Here’s what’s happening: the canvas is sitting inside of a

containing my still image, but I’m drawing on the nested (I think you had it the other way around, which was causing your problems).

Hope that helps, Remy

Retrieving objects from

DJ asked:

I wanted to know if there is any way in which the drawn objects say rectangle, circle, line, … within canvas can be identified based on the selection at later point in time (after they are drawn).

If there are no direct APIs how could we achieve it. Do we have to store the co-ordinates of each of the created object within and do the object identification based on mouse cursor? Thanks

Unfortunately, there’s no way to retrieve these objects unless you write your own system to handle it. There’s no native support for this in .

It sounds like you actually need to use SVG, which will allow to you to hook event listeners and query the DOM tree that’s created. If you need some convincing that SVG is the right tool for the job, have a look at the Raphaël JavaScript Library. It uses SVG exclusively and is able to create some very impressive drawings and animations.

Cheers, Remy

Custom tags

Mike asked:

So by using some JavaScript I can insert unfamiliar tags into IE, and using CSS I can format them. My question is why stop with HTML5 tags like section and nav? What are the pros and cons of custom tags like , , , or even , , ?

Custom elements go against having a standard like HTML5. Standards map out the set of elements, attributes, and APIs that the browsers need to implement so web developers can use them, and they provide those developers with a common approach to marking up a web page.

If custom elements were allowed, we would have an infinite number of ways to mark up content, many of which would share a common goal but require different implementations. As an example, here is a number of different elements I can dream up for some primary content:

, , , , ,

, , , , , , , , , , , , , and . Many of them are bad ideas, but hopefully you see my point. This doesn’t even account for the more predictable , , that would likely also be used.

This sort of markup would make HTML a nightmare to maintain. A developer coming into an existing site would have to learn which elements have been used and what their purpose is. And it’s not just painful for developers. Browser vendors would have to find ways to parse these elements and define how they should be used. Is this element supposed to be block-level? Is it interactive? Should it impact the document outline? And what about search engines? How do they know that defines the most important content on the page, the content that should really be indexed?

Standards narrow the possibilities and ensure developers, browsers, and machines (search engines and the like) are all speaking the same language. Many people spend a great deal of time debating the specification, trying to reach consensus on which proposals should be standardized and how they should be implemented.

So stick to the standards! They exist for everyone’s benefit. As browsers continue to implement the specification correctly (even IE is catching up), our jobs will be made easier and we can spend more time creating really cool things

John Alsopp’s fantastic article Semantics in HTML5 goes into more detail about this issue. You can also see where some of the element names came from by looking at the work Hixie did researching class names in Google’s index.

Regards, Mike

The `role` attribute, SEO, and

Robson asked:

What about the role attribute? Was it dropped from specification? What will be the “role” of the role attribute in HTML5?

Today, just the home page should have the name of the site into a H1 element. On others pages, the H1 should be used to the title of the articles. How do search engines interpret the HGROUP and multiples HEADER and H1 elements today? How to implement the HGROUP and the HEADER today without impact the SEO? Thanks, guys!

To answer your first three questions, role is in. You can use it belt-and-suspenders style until assistive technology catches up with HTML5. Just be careful: “Authors may use the ARIA role and aria-* attributes on HTML elements, in accordance with the requirements described in the ARIA specifications, except where these conflict with the strong native semantics described below”.

For the second part of your question, that’s not true. You can use more than one

in HTML 4/XHTML 1. It’s not advised to make every heading
in HTML 4/XHTML 1 (because historically some people did that to spam), but it may be appropriate in some cases — e.g., site name and page title. Using two
‘s on a single page has no effect on SEO.

With regard to
and
, you’re asking the wrong question. Search engines care about high-quality, relevant content. Search engines penalise spamming, but writing markup according to the specification is not spamming. The HTML5 editor works at Google, so they’re well aware of the spec. html5doctor.com has implemented and
, and it hasn’t hurt our search engine rankings any

For more, see our articles on the header element and the hgroup element.

You probably don’t want to use
everywhere anyhow, as CSS selectors are not that smart. If you wrap every
-
in a sectioning element (
,
,
,
), you don’t have to worry about keeping a logical order for your headings. Doing this means you don’t need to overwrite CSS as much. The old style, however, with the requirement to keep a logical order for your headings, still works.

Again, you’re concerned with the wrong thing. Good SEO = good content. Worrying about placement or what search engines think is a waste of time — worry about good content.

Peace – Oli

Got a question for us?

That wraps up this round of questions. If you’ve got a query about the HTML5 spec or how to implement it, you can get in touch with us and we’ll do our best to help.

Related Posts:

Your Questions Answered #11

Your Questions #16

Your Questions Answered #7

Your Questions Answered #5

Your Questions 18

Your Questions #13 originally appeared on HTML5 Doctor on September 28, 2010.

Your questions answered #2

Jack Osborne — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 08:39:09 +0000

Since the launch of the site we’ve be welcoming questions regarding the HTML 5 spec through the contact form. It doesn’t matter if you think your question is too <H1>big</H1> or <small>small</small> we’re here to help.

Last month we decided to pull together a post that covered some of the emails that were sent in through the contact page. Since the publication of the last post we have received a lot more questions regarding the HTML 5 spec and have decided that some of these warranted another post.

Content Type

Christian asked:

In checking out various implementations of html5 around the web with a quick “view source”, I find everyone seems to specify content type in the headers like so; <meta http-equiv=”content-type” content=”text/html;charset=utf-8″> even though it’s already a part of the HTTP header.

Does it really need to be in both locations, or can we all cut out that redundancy as long as our servers are specifying the content type appropriately in the HTTP header?

If you take a look at Dr.Bruce’s weblog http://www.brucelawson.co.uk/ you will see that most of the information can be cut out and simplified. As more and more sites make the jump to HTML 5 you will be able to see what elements can and cannot be left out. If you’re interested in checking out more sites then please feel free to visit our sister site HTML 5 Gallery where you will be able to view the source of plenty of sites that are already sporting HTML 5 elements in their markup.

If you’re looking to take your reading even further then Dr. Remy has recently published an article entitled HTML5 boilerplates which should give you more information on the above.

HTML 5 & SEO

Julio asked:

I’m thinking of using HTML 5 in my projects as soon as possible, but I need to be sure that everything will work just as fine as HTML 4. My question is: Google (and other search engines) is already indexing HTML 5 sites? In terms of SEO, will I have any drawbacks?

In answer to your question, yes Google is indexing HTML 5 sites. Between us we run several sites built with HTML 5 markup and none of the Doctors have had any issues with our sites being indexed or competitive on key phrases.

In fact if you look at the source code of google.com you’ll see that their doctype is declared as <! doctype html> meaning it’s using HTML 5! Another site that is part of the Google group, Youtube, has also recently created a mock-up of their layout that can be found at http://www.youtube.com/html5 and this definitely shows that they are thinking about it. One last fact to help settle your nerves, if we’ve not managed to do it already, is that Ian Hickson who is writing the bulk of the HTML 5 spec works for Google so we don’t think you’ll have any problems.

HTML 5 Templates

Klaus asked:

Where can if find HTML 5 Templates?

When this email came in, we weren’t too sure by what Klaus meant so we’re tackling his question with two responses.

For static HTML pages you’d be hard pushed to find a better resource than Remy’s boilerplate explained here: http://html5doctor.com/html-5-boilerplates/

However, if you are looking for some HTML 5 WordPress themes then have a look at the following:

WebSocket Support

Dave asked:

There’s a lot of features, and I can’t find anywhere that lists current support in major browser versions (and/or with Google Gears). The particular one I’m looking for is WebSocket support

This is a good resource for checking the state of browser support for a particular feature: http://a.deveria.com/caniuse/ Regarding web workers specifically, we’ve come across a library that implements Web Sockets and falls away when it’s available natively.

None of the doctors have used these personally but feel that they will be useful in answer to your question:

Reusing Elements Within Same Page

Daniel asked:

Dear Doctor,
Just a quick confirmation please. Am I right in thinking that nav, like header and footer, can be used more than once in a single page? For example, surrounding a menu at the top of the page and surrounding next/previous buttons at the bottom. Come to think of it, is it fair to say that all tags except html, head and body can be used more than once?
Thanks in advance, doctor.
I’ll be back soon about my dodgy knee.

Yes, for more information please reference this article – http://html5doctor.com/designing-a-blog-with-html5/ and this diagram of a single blog entry (of course, there can be many blog entries on a page) http://html5doctor.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/html5-article-outline.gif probably.

Other articles that we have already covered on the site – http://html5doctor.com/the-header-element/, http://html5doctor.com/the-footer-element/ and a great article on the http://html5doctor.com/nav-element/.

Learning HTML/XHTML Before Reading About HTML 5

Manuel asked:

Hi, I’m new to this field and I would like to learn HTML.

If I understand correctly, most future web sites will be written in HTML5 (served using the text/html MIME type) and just a few sites will use XHTML5 (served using the application/xhtml+xml MIME type). As a consequence, I will focus on HTML5.

HTML5 can use both the HTML syntax and the stricter XHTML syntax, but since I’m starting from scratch I suppose I could safely ignore the XHTML syntax and focus on the HTML syntax (HTML 4.1/5). Why bother about XHTML syntax in 2009? Unfortunately all modern introductory book/online resources about HTML are focused on the XHTML syntax. Where I could learn the pure HTML syntax without any reference to the useless and distracting (for my purposes) XHTML syntax?

Your best bet would be to get into the good coding practices of XHTML (lowercase tag, always closing tags, etc.) while writing HTML, there are a number of resources on the Internet for learning HTML 4.01 which you shouldn’t have any problems finding. A particular favorite of mine when I was starting out was HTMLDog.

We understand the issue of a number of the resources use the XHTML sytax but as I said above this will get you into good coding habits when writing HTML (particularly as HTML is less strict).

thank you for your quick reply. You won me: I will learn XHTML (from HTMLDog). Just a last question: when in the next future I will make the transition to HTML5 (served using the text/html MIME type) I hope the XHTML syntax validates anyway, so that I will have just to change the doctype of my pages to <!DOCTYPE html>. Right? (My fear is that the XHTML syntax will require a XHTML5 doctype).

This is correct though you won’t get the extra semantics added by HTML 5. For that I suggest you read the articles that appear on the site. If you want to use semantic class naming in your current XHTML I suggest you see the related links after ‘Automated Conversion’ in this post. – http://html5doctor.com/your-questions-answered-1/

There we have it folks…

Another quick round up of some of the more difficult questions we’ve had to respond to over the last few weeks. We hope that you’ll find this article helpful and remember that if you have a question that hasn’t been covered in an article so far feel free to get in touch, you never know, your question might just appear in one of these posts.

Your questions answered #2 originally appeared on HTML5 Doctor on August 20, 2009.