:: Web Entrepreneur Advisory | Yahoo Supports New NO-CONTENT Indexing Tag ::

Yahoo Introduces New NO-CONTENT Indexing Tag

While it's always been possible to prevent whole pages from being indexed, Yahoo is now supporting an innovative robots-nocontent tag which will let you prevent part of a page from being included in Yahoo's search index.

The NO-CONTENT tag lets you tell Yahoo what to focus on and what to ignore. For example, you may want Yahoo to ignore navigational links, ads, and any other content which is irrelevant to your page content. This allows you to clean up the appearace of your SERPs, thus letting visitors view only relevant text, which increases the odds of getting a click. You'll have more control over how your page ranks in Yahoo's SERPs, and specifically which content ranks.

Here's the code you'd plug into your page:

If you want to block a whole section of text, the NO-CONTENT tag prevents you from having to block text on a paragraph level. You can simply enclose multiple paragraphs in a DIV tag like this:

The NO-CONTENT tag is not cloaking. It doesn't prevent spidering, and, in fact, doesn't even prevent indexing. Yahoo will still see the entire page and spider it. The specific section of the page enclosed by the NO-CONTENT tag simply won't be searchable, and won't be used to determine how your page ranks in Yahoo.

So far, only Yahoo is using this NO-CONTENT tag, and there's no word yet whether the other search engines will recognize it in the future.