Martin Splitt from Google explained the concept of centerpiece annotation, a term used in Google to define the primary content of a page or site. Martin said they are able to understand that a page’s primary topic is on A and the rest of the content on that page might not be the primary. So Google will weigh the content differently based on that, Martin said.

He said this at the 28:50 mark in this Duda webinar, here is what Martin said:

Here is the embed:

Yes, he did mention this briefly in the May 27th episode where he said “A question that I often also get with JavaScript is if we treat JavaScript content differently. We do have annotations for content– what we think is the centerpiece of an article or what we think is content on the side and stuff.”

Glenn Gabe summed this up on Twitter as saying “Google has a centerpiece annotation (& others). It looks at semantic content & layout tree. From NLP, G can identify a page is about topic X, then ID supplemental content vs main content, boilerplate, etc. Then that can get weighted differently by Google.”

This makes sense, I just didn’t fully know that Google called this “centerpiece annotation” internally.

Forum discussion at Twitter.