Are Bullet Points Bad For Context?
-
Cyrus' webinar yesterday got me thinking about the use of bullet points and Google's increasing affection for context and semantics.
Because of their brevity, I can see bullet points parsing up context/semantics etc.
Some of our competitors (apparently trying to appeal to Google) are writing 2-4 sentences about the product in the desciption section followed by bullet points repeating the same information. They'll also put a few sentences of description at the top of the page above the price and then repeat it below in the description (this is relatively common).
I put text in the description section and like bullet points as a shopper because I can quickly and easily see important information - therefore I use them heavily in product descriptions.
Is Google smart enough process bullet points and mash together context or would Google prefer content in well written sentences?
Should I be frying bigger fish?
-
Thanks fellas. Agreed.
-
I would go with frying bigger fish. I've read usability/user experience studies that claim bullet points are helpful, and I think that they can be good when used appropriately, but I wouldn't stress too much about them. I imagine everyone else has read the same studies, because I see bullet points used for the sake of bullet points all over the place. That's not good for user experience, so I wouldn't go down that road. You need to get customers to your page, but you also need to convert them.
-
Very interesting question but I think you should be frying bigger fish .
Even if you add them as bullet points it's still text and I think Google is smart enough to figure out the context. Also since you're adding a description you shouldn't have any worries.
Personally I like bullet points when shopping so as long as you don't overdo it I think it's a good strategy.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Is using a H1 tag in a logo image bad for SEO?
We have brand logos on certain pages that have H1 tags in them - the H1 text being the brand's name, as this is what we'd want the title of the page to be. The logos are at the top of the page instead of a written title. But is this the best option for SEO? Do search engines value H1 tags in images as highly as a standard H1 tag?Would it be better for SEO to add an alt tag to the logo and add a separate H1 tag on the page that's also the name of the brand?
On-Page Optimization | | DVLighting0 -
How to explain to a client that duplicate content is bad...
Afternoon! An SEO client of ours has copied a load of landing/category page content from other sites. Lots of emails have been sent back and forth asking them to remove it, but they are adamant to keep it up there until we have time to amend it. We have explained to them: The Google penalty risks The copyright risks The short and long-term implications for their brand new business/website The money they are spending on our SEO package could be completely wasted if they're caught I think the above is pretty black and white, but the director of this company will not budge. Does anyone have any different approaches? The director said he's happy for us to amend the content but, in the meantime, the plagiarised content will not be removed. Cheers, Lewis
On-Page Optimization | | PeaSoupDigital0 -
Multiple menu items pointing to same page
I have an automotive dealer as a client. The primary nav has a finance menu item, which (of course) points to the finance related pages. He just requested that I add a finance link item, as child menu items, under the new and used car nav items. Now, this is wrong for a host of reasons, what is the best way to communicate to this to him? I mean, I see this as a usability issue, it's wrong thematically, we would end up having 3 links pointing to the same page. Would this classify as dupe content?
On-Page Optimization | | AfroSEO0 -
What's the point of my blog?
My website, www.toplinecomms.com has a reasonably good blog that gets quite good interaction and sharing. I introduced the blog at the start of 2013 because the general sentiment from all the SEO books and articles I had read was that a good blog could be invaluable to a search marketing campaign. The posts on the blog are keyword optimised and they get great shares and social engagement. However, I have noticed that the blog is stealing my services' pages' thunder! There are some keywords that I am keen for our services pages to rank for, but the blog is beating them to it! So my question is: How should I be using my blog to get my services pages to rank higher?
On-Page Optimization | | HeatherBakerTopLine0 -
70 Domain Names Point to 70 Nearly Identical Inner Webpages
I have a new SEO client; his website has never been optimized. There are 70 domain names involved with this one website. Each domain name points to an exact replica of the main page, other than the fact that a small content box has different info in it, and sometimes the header graphic is different. So, 70 webpages that are 5% different from each other and 5% different from the main page. How badly is this issue affecting this website's ability to rank well, and what is the best way to solve this?
On-Page Optimization | | netsites0 -
Are pages with lots of pictures with outbound links bad for seo?
"Inspiration" blog posts are a good example. The one below has 80 pictures as part of a logo inspiration page. But each picture has an outbound url. Bad or doesn't matter? http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/80-creative-and-well-designed-logos/
On-Page Optimization | | seo_f20120 -
5 websites, 1 root domain name: good or bad?
Hi guys, I'm new here, so this might be a basic question to the experts here! So here is my situation: I have 1 "umbrella" website (root domain name) that contains 4 different websites, for a total of 5 different websites. They are related, but we needed to brand each website differently to fit each strategy. Q: I have 23 domain names.. this means I have 23 sub-domain names?
On-Page Optimization | | Jacky_C
Q: Is this practice good or bad for my SEO?
Q: should I analyze each domain name/SD? Here are my 5 websites
RD: furisgreen.com
SD1: furcouncil.com
SD2: furfashions.com
SD3: naffem.com
SD4: beautifullycanadian.com Thank you for your help!!0 -
How best to approach archiving badly optimised content
I signed up SEO Moz about a month ago as i'm currently rebuilding my site from scratch and wanted to learn from current mistakes. At present I use the forum software Invision Power Board to manage my site and one thing i've learnt is that it is terrible for SEO, there are so many thousands of errors listed by the crawler that it's not even worth trying to fix it. However because it has 5 or 6 years worth of content alot of which is on Google I don't want to totally remove it, rather I would prefer to archive it of with a big banner at the top letting anybody that visits it know that it's no longer in use and pointing them to the frontpage. I should note that it is in a subfolder already so the location of any of the links won't be changed. So the few questions I have are: The forum index has alot of link juice and I would like to redirect that to the new forum index, however for archive purposes the old index still needs to be accessible. Some topics are very popular and appear high in Google and have alot of backlinks. The important information in these forum topics will be available elsewhere on the new rebuilt site. Again I would like to redirect both link juice and users to the new page, however being a forum topic there are tens or hundreds of pages of old comments that need to still be accessible for reference. There are bound to be duplicate meta title and description issues with new similarly named categories appearing both on the new site and the old forum, is this going to be that much of a problem? So really what i'm asking is, how should I go about archiving this of without destroying content and rankings, but still making sure that the new stuff is getting the right exposure both to users and search engines alike?
On-Page Optimization | | freezedriedmedia0