One of the things I love about this industry is that every day you discover people who are willing to test things out, that don’t simply take things as they are. Kuddos to them!
Shaun Anderson tried to figure out how Google would treat and index a title with 50 terms inside the tag. The results were very surprising to say the least.
Hobo SEO UK : “You can put 50 words in your title tag, we’ll read it”
Two weeks ago I talked about a post on WebStraction’s blog about the new Yahoo Class Directive.
The blog has a very interesting insight about how content should be dealt with by the SE’s. On a recent post webstractions reinforced the idea that the Bots should be told what constitutes content within a webpage. By doing so we are assuming by default that webpages don’t have content, but in reality, isn’t the primary purpose of a webpage to provide content?
I don’t necessarily agree with this concept.
So as far as I’m concerned, it makes a lot more sense to filter out what we don’t want indexed then the opposite,
On a more technical aspect Webstractions proposes the usage of the robots tag with new elements present and defined in an attribute within the tag. Very interesting read.
I have always wondered why this feature wasn’t developed before.
Yahoo brings us the robots-nocontent tag that literally allows us to prevent indexing of specific content within our webpage that for some reason we don’t want indexed.
The first thing that came to my mind when I first heard of this was – Duplicate content.
This seems to be the perfect solution to avoid the unnecessary duplication of content on WebPages and subsequently on the Search results.
Quoting should be about bringing value to the content that is being quoted, not the other way around. This new Tag does just that, it doesn’t remove the whole intend behind quoting, but at the same time doesn’t remove the ownership from the original content providers.
Step Forward towards better search results
Most importantly, if used properly, this new features improves the relevancy of the search results.
I don’t want nor do I need to find the same content regurgitated over and over again on the search results and WebPages. Using this tag should be instated has a good practice just as the no-follow usage was initially was intended to be used.
How does it work?
Very simple. Just assign a class attribute - robots-nocontent within a div, span or paragraph tag. It will affect the entire contents within that tag just like any other class attribute would.
Yahoo will not index this content
On a final note, on Danny Sullivan’s Daily Search Cast I heard that even Matt Cutts praised this feature, which might indicate that we might see Google using it in the very near future.
Reference: Yahoo Supports New Robots-Nocontent Tag To Block Indexing Within A Page