Introducing The Robots-Nocontent HTML Attribute

7th May 2007

Yahoo! Search have just introduced a new HTML attribute that their crawlers will recognise as a call to exclude sections of a page from being considered relevant or included in excerpts / snippets on the search listings.

The “robots-nocontent” attribute can be added as a class to any section in a site, such as a div or a table. Yahoo! won’t use the terms contained in these specially tagged sections as information for finding the page or for the abstract in the search results.

Menus, navigational elements, forms, user generated comments could be possible areas of a website that most webmasters might like to prevent the crawler from picking up on and considering as the main content of the page. The syntax of this attribute is very straightforward. It should be added as a class within the element tag. For example:

div id=”menu” class=”robots-nocontent”
table width=”25%” id=”prices” class=”robots-nocontent”

Yahoo! are updating their index to incorporate this change.

This may seem to be a nice move for some webmasters, but the overall impression left seems to indicates Yahoo!’s inability to semantically dissect information and recognise important content from unimportant or repetitive elements.

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