« Flash, Javascript, CSS, Ajax, sIFR, and Textual Image Replacement... Oh My! | Main | SEO Case Study: Press Release Archives »
Yahoo robots nocontent Tag - Google?
June 05, 2007
In the beginning of May Yahoo introduced the robots nocontent tag. This allows you to block redundant, useless text from being indexed:
| Web pages often include headers, footers, navigational sections, repeated boilerplate text, copyright notices, ad sections, or dynamic content that is useful to users — but not to search engines. Webmasters can apply the "robots-nocontent" attribute to indicate to search engines any content that is extraneous to the main unique content of the page. Yahoo! Search observes the class="robots-nocontent" present on XHTML elements, such as div, span, and all others |
| Applying the "class=robots-nocontent" Attribute:
Listed below are several examples of how to apply this attribute for various uses and different syntax options: < span class="robots-nocontent">This is the site header that is present on all pages of the site and is not related to any particular page < p class="robots-nocontent">This is a boilerplate legal disclaimer required on each page of the site < div class="robots-nocontent">This is a section where ads are displayed on the page. Words that show up in ads may be entirely unrelated to the page contents |
Will Google follow Yahoo's lead? This can be very useful when dealing with duplicate content issues across the same site or multiple sites. Having numerous products with the same description/name can cause duplication issues and you can find your pages in the Google Supplemental index.
Whether it be Book Sellers or RV Dealers, when your inventory is duplicated across multiple sites you are going to have problems. A way to deal with some of this may be to use a Google version of the Yahoo nocontent tag and eliminate much of the redundant text.
Google - Where are you on this one? Please step up and offer the same tool.
Happy Trails!
All posts by James Gunn
posted by James Gunn at June 5, 2007 07:18 AM
Intrapromote: [ Case studies | SEO services | Bios ]
Comments
I think that this is open to spammers or people chasing algorithms, after all, if you can tell search engines not to look at parts of your page, say, the non keyword rich parts of your sales letter, for example, then where is the bad part of that?
There are so many of these things which are available to people to take advantage of if you follow them you could probably do quite well.
It is a encroaching into hat of the darker variety area though.
Posted by: Alan Marks at June 6, 2007 09:45 AM
I think this implementation may very well prove useless to those of us who make heavy use of CSS (recommended by W3C) for page formatting. If I am already using a class definition to describe how I want something to be formatted, I cannot, to the best of my knowledge, define a SECOND class to tell Yahoo! that I would like to have some content blocked. To do this, I would, for example, have to define within , which can make for some messy code. I don't know ... perhaps it is doable, but to me this implementation is a big ... OOPS!
Posted by: Ken Anderson at June 10, 2007 10:40 AM
Prior post, "... I would, for example, have to define within , which can make for some messy code."
Attempted to show div tags, so that it should have read more like, "... I would for example, have to define div within div, which can make for some messy code."
Sorry about the confusion.
Posted by: Ken Anderson at June 10, 2007 10:50 AM