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This is a silly question but i am bit confused. Can any explain What is the disadvantages of removing HTML tags before indexing the pages?

Thanks in advance.

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I'm going to give this benefit of the doubt and assume there is a question here. Either way it's probably better off on Webmasters. – Josh K Nov 17 '10 at 19:46
2  
Can you clarify your question a bit? It's hard to understand exactly what you are asking. – John Conde♦ Nov 17 '10 at 20:12

migrated from stackoverflow.com Nov 17 '10 at 19:49

2 Answers

up vote 2 down vote

I can think of two good reasons.

  • By removing all the HTML tags you're removing all the semantics of the text.
    This disadvantages any ranking algorithm - all else being equal, a page with "Tree" in a heading is more likely to be about trees than one with "tree" in the text somewhere.

  • You're also discarding attributes that could be used to index.
    To illustrate, a link to an image of a tree might have alt text describing the tree. Discard the alt text, and your page might not show up in the search.

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up vote 0 down vote

It depends on how you remove them. If you use a smart library, like jsoup or tagsoup or neko, you get nothing but benefit. If you use a bad library, it can lose your content for you.

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Can someone expand on this? Those libraries seem to be HTML parsers. I don't see how their use was benefit search engine indexing. – Lèse majesté Nov 17 '10 at 23:50
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By avoiding treating the tags as words in the index. E.g., searching for 'head' – bmargulies Sep 9 '11 at 22:42

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