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34 Comments
- KevinJB, on 10/12/2007, -1/+8No, what *you* just said was a stupid idea. That'll have the exact OPPOSITE of the effect you want: it'll hide it from your users, but not from robots. Hell it might even get you flagged as a spammer by Google and the like. :-P
- dannysullivan, on 10/12/2007, -2/+6They're not dictating anything. They're saying if you want to use this particular class, to tell them something specific (don't index content you don't want indexed), they'll honor that. In addition, class can have attribute you want it to have. It's designed to allow authors or others to establish custom attributes like this
- dannysullivan, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4@gafasiesornivek, nofollow only works to exclude links from being counted for credit. this is designed to block out text within a page. you cannot do that with nofollow. Sorry the reply is up there -- Digg is getting completely funky and tossing my replies in the wrong places. Going to restart my browser.
- Dracos, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4They're not creating a new tag, they're abusing an existing attribute: class.
The problem they are trying to solve is addressed by the XHTML2 role attribute, which is pure genius.
I for one will not allow Yahoo or anyone else to influence/dictate what class names I use. Class is for CSS, not search engines. - elsewhen, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5not only is it important that the other engines adopt this tag, they have to treat it in the same way (entire page will be indexed, only the tagged section will be unsearchable). it would be a real mess if the different engines treated the tag differently.
- modeless, on 10/12/2007, -4/+7It's more than ridiculous, it's a terrible idea for everyone except scumbag SEO "consultants". If your website has so much crap in it that Google can't find your content, the solution is not to hide the crap from Google; the solution is to *remove it*. Your users will thank you and your ranking will rise even more than if you somehow hid the crap from Google. As a Google user, I want Google to index your crap and lower your ranking so I don't accidentally visit your site and get inundated by crap.
- TruthElixirX, on 10/12/2007, -3/+5This is one of the most ridiculous things to come out in awhile. It will cause lots of problems, and will be a long time for people to support it, and pointless unless it becomes a standard.
I get tired of jumping through hoops for SEO. Index my content, if people like it, they'll link back. Having mod_rewrite, nofollow, bot friendly site maps, etc gets old. - julianrod, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Yes... really technically speaking, it's the attribute's content.
- KevinJB, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Where'd you get that from, I've never seen or heard of it before and a search turns up nothing.
- toggo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I'd have thought it would be easier to specify the relevant content rather than the stuff that you didn't want to be indexed.
- crossmr, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2People search with Yahoo?
- chkmate21, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1thats a good point.
- No13Baby, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2It's an attribute, not a tag. Actually it's just a class.
- KevinJB, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I really do have to agree though, there were much less 'clunky' ways to go about this, for example I happen to like Google's method for Adsense using comments. (see https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=23168 , Digg erases it if I put it in here :/) It would be a lot nicer than having to add extraneous markup I don't need. That said, it's quite helpful and I'm glad they've put this out, now we just need Google and MSN to follow suit. :-)
- aura, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1What's wrong with the currently used < ! -- NOINDEX -- > < ! -- /NOINDEX -- > HTML comments i've seen sites using?
We don't need search engines adding more standards, we just need them to follow the ones we already have. - etnu, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Yes, heaven forbid that your website have useful navigation on it.
This lets webmasters tell the spider that some part of the site isn't worth indexing. There is no way to get that level of sophistication in the spider at this point in time.
It's a kludge, yes, but it's no worse than the nofollow kludge, which has helped improve search results dramatically. - insovietrussia, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Google already does a similar thing, but in a much better way through their Sitemaps application:
http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/
Although you can't specify sections of code to hide, you can optimise certain areas of you site so that they are presented more prominently. - dannysullivan, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2To be clear, the priority numbers you can set for pages have absolutely nothing to do with making your pages be seen more prominently. I can't stress this enough. Sitemaps controls crawling -- how often a page is visited, not how well it ranks. You can say with priority numbers that pages should be revisited more frequently *in your opinion*. The emphasis is important because right now, officially, Google still says those priority numbers are not actively being used. They are suggestions only, not something it necessarily will follow.
- adc86, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1...While it would create a possible vector for abuse, it might be an interesting concept to use a "robots" media css (as opposed to "display" or "print") for search engines to see. Perhaps a provide limited support in the way of display: or maybe to a lesser extent font-size:, etc.
- adc86, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Uhh.. Unless you want them to be able to see whatever you're classing as such. Think about a div for ads, navigation, etc... You want it to display: block (inline) but you don't want to be indexed as whatever's in there...
...Bah, left the page open while I went out to eat... - etnu, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0XHTML 1.0 isn't even supported by 85% of web browsers, and you're suggesting using an xhtml 2 attribute?
Guess what? Web standards haven't caught up with current reality. When they do, we'll use them. Maybe if the W3C didn't spend 7 ***** years debating minute details we would actually have implementations of these standards by now. - etnu, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0That's for adsense targeting, not search indexing.
I would submit that if your site has more markup that needs to be excluded than needs to be indexed, your site isn't worth indexing at all. - dannysullivan, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1That's a good point -- why not tag what you DO want included. I talked with Yahoo about this. Here's the problem. By default, normally everything gets indexed. So if you flag something as YES, does that mean everything else should be treated as no? Or if you flag somethings yes, some things no, what happens to the things that people will forget to flag? If you treat them as YES also, then you really have no need for a YES attribute.
- Abulia, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0this is stupid, google has already implemented something similar which makes a lot more sense, where by you specify which text SHOULD be given priority
- insovietrussia, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1Be careful what you say about SEOs. Digg is rife with em.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1This is idiotic. Hasn't anyone heard of rel="nofollow" ? Look it up, I'm not going to waste any more time than this.
- SoccerDad, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1that RSS button on that site is too big
- sannm, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1Think that RSS icon is big enough? Damn, takes up half my screen.
- dannysullivan, on 10/12/2007, -3/+2You got it, big icon all gone :)
- xxMarka, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1webtickle, please use better grammar
- smex, on 10/12/2007, -3/+1Cloaking makes more sense. If I can sniff the IP and USER-AGENT to verify the anonymous visitor is a bot, then I can serve them different content. This way, they have not choice but to play fair.
- smex, on 10/12/2007, -3/+1I have found that javascript is a great way to hide stuff from user's view but not from search engines.
- SuperJared, on 10/12/2007, -5/+2This is a stupid idea. Any user can add a custom CSS file to their browser ala:
.robots-nocontent {display:none;} - Yegger, on 10/12/2007, -18/+209-f9-11-04-9d-74-e5-5b-d8-43-56-c5-63-56-88-c0
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