May 21st, 2010 by Glenn

For a while now, SEOs in the know have hypothesized that search engines use Vision-based Page Segmentation (VIPS) to learn what parts of a page they should pay attention to. (Daily SEO Tips has a nice intro to VIPS here…)

But are they right? Do search engines really use VIPS? Is VIPS why links in body copy are more valuable than links in footers, headers and margins? Is it why body copy plays a bigger part in how you’re indexed?

In this guest post, one of the Godfathers of SEO, my mate and SEO extraordinaire, Bill Slawski, answers this very important question… (And if you don't follow Bill, you definitely should!)

Bill Slawski's verdict on VIPS…

Microsoft introduced the idea of VIPS in 2003, and both Google and Yahoo have published patents that describe web page segmentation.  Yahoo's Priyank Garg and Google's Matt Cutts have also spoken up on the topic, though not naming it "VIPS," which is Microsoft's name.

Microsoft published a whitepaper on Block Level Link analysis a couple of years later that introduced the idea of indexing blocks, or segments, of documents and introduced the idea of a block level PageRank and a block level HITS algorithm.

Google published a patent in 2004 on "Document segmentation based on visual gaps" which mostly discussed the idea of segmenting parts of pages so that sections which discussed different businesses could be used in local search, but a paragraph at the end of the document also explained that the process could be used to segment a page into parts, so that things like navigational boilerplate could be ignored.

The post I wrote recently about Google's reasonable surfer model also referred to links from different parts of pages such as sidebars and footerrs possibly carrying less weight.

Yahoo has published patents/whitepapers on a template analysis program for web pages so that they could understand the different parts of pages, and treat them differently for a number of reasons.

Here are a number of posts on the topic that I've written, going back to 2006:

• Yahoo Web Page Segmentation: Distinguishing Noise from Information
• How a Search Engine Might Analyze the Linking Structure of a Web Site
• Breaking Pages Apart: What Automatic Segmentation of Webpages Might Mean to Design and SEO
• Microsoft Granted Patent on Vision-Based Document Segmentation (VIPS)
• Search Engines, Web Page Segmentation, and the Most Important Block
• Microsoft Playing with Blocks to Understand How Images Might be Related
• The Importance of Page Layout in SEO
• Google and Document Segmentation Indexing for Local Search
• Google's Reasonable Surfer: How the Value of a Link May Differ Based upon Link and Document Features and User Data

Read also this interview with Yahoo's Priyank Garg, and watct this Matt Cutts video.

My opinion? The question really isn't whether or not the major search engines are doing something like VIPS or not, but rather why they wouldn't be?

---