May 2–Today Yahoo announced that there is a new tag that will allow webmaster to block its robots from indexing specific part of a web page.
The new tag, robots-nocontent tag, will help webmasters to point out the part of their web page that they don’t want to be included in the page indexing. These parts of the web page usually are ads and other unrelated cluster (e.g. navigational links, social bookmarking links, etc) that surround the “main” core content, the page’s main article.
So, how do you use this new robots-nocontent tag?
In order to use it, you need to add the class attribute to the part of the web page where you do not want Yahoo robots to index:
class=”robots-nocontent”
You can assign this attribute with < p >, < div >, and a host of other tags, but here’s an example on how to use it in ONE paragraph:
BEFORE:
< p > Surrounding texts and other stuffs not related to the main article…< / p>
AFTER:
< p class=”robots-nocontent”> Surrounding texts and other stuffs not related to the main article…< / p>
This will exclude the “Surrounding texts and other stuffs not related to the main article…” from counting or *searchable in the whole page/main article content, thus improving your on page optimization effort (e.g. keyword density of a page).
*Searchable means that the parts of the web page that get flagged with the robots-nocontent tag simply won’t be searchable. Yahoo, however, still stores all the words of the web page within the index library of its web documents. Basically, the parts of the page that you’ve flagged with the robots-nocontent tag will not be ‘considered’ by Yahoo search engine algorithm that examines the text content of the page.
Anyhow, here’s how the robots-nocontent tag is used in more than one paragraphs with the container tags (e.g. < div > and < span > tags):
< div class=”robots-nocontent”>
< p >
Paragraph 1 of surrounding texts and other stuffs not related to the main article…< / p >
< p >
Paragraph 2 of surrounding texts and other stuffs not related to the main article…< / p >
< p >
Paragraph 3 of surrounding texts and other stuffs not related to the main article…< / p >
< / p >
< / div>
WILL THIS TAG BE ANY OF USE?
In my opinion, not so much:
1. Let’s face it, who have the time dig in to the template files to edit all the ‘necessary’ change and re-edit them when something else change? And this is ONLY for Yahoo! So, far no other major search engines have followed suit. (Let hope that they do, because I really don’t want to edit ALL of my websites’ templates just because new laws are laid down by different search engines. Who would have thought SEO is such a hassle like rocket science, eh?).
2. This robots-nocontent tag is only for serious METICULOUS webmasters (and SEOers) who actually care about on-page search engine optimization. Beside the H1, H2, and etc. tags, now there’s a robots-nocontent tags.
3. Non-tech, non-code-oriented people/blogger simply won’t use it, simply because it requires more learning, a.k.a. WORK!
4. By excluding the a certain part of the page (e.g. navigation structure with links) to be indexed, this ‘may’ well be telling the robots not to follow or index the pages from the navigation-links. *This is not known and has not been posted on the Yahoo official site.
5. What I don’t get is why Yahoo not ‘adapting’ Google Section Targeting instead of coming up with a “new” nocontent tags, as section targeting does almost the same thing (for Adsense) but with less work–less number of places to place tags =?
*Section Targeting is a way of embedding special tags inside HTML to give Google’s spider robots a better idea of where’s/what’s important on your page (to serve better contextual Adsense ads).
If you’re interested, you can read more about this robots-nocontent tag at Yahoo’s official announcement.
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