Yahoo! recently announced a way you can specify what sections on your page you want crawled by their search engine spider. If you have parts of your web page that are unrelated to the main content (ie navigation, footer, etc) you can insert the “robots-nocontent” tag.
Benefits of the “robots-nocontent” tag:
* Improves the focus on the main content of your pages.
* Helps target your pages in search results by making sure the appropriate deep page in your site can surface for the right queries.
* Helps improve the abstracts for your pages in results by identifying unrelated text on the page and thus omitting it from consideration for the search result summaries.
* Increase the likelihood that the user will find your page, find it relevant, click on your result, and convert.
* Helps Yahoo! to ignore the clutter on your web page.
How to apply the “class=robots-nocontent” Attribute:
Here are several examples how to apply this attribute:
<.div class="robots-nocontent".>This is the navigational menu of the site and is common on all pages. It contains many terms and keywords not related to this site<./div.>
<.span class="robots-nocontent".>This is the site header that is present on all pages of the site and is not related to any particular page<./span.>
<.p class="robots-nocontent".>This is a boilerplate legal disclaimer required on each page of the site<./p.>
<.div class="robots-nocontent".>This is a section where ads are displayed on the page. Words that show up in ads may be entirely unrelated to the page contents<./div.>
Note: To use the above code remove periods before and after the html tags.
You can use the “class=robots-nocontent” attribute with all XHTML tags and thus have great flexibility on applying this to your site pages.
My recommendation
Other search engines (ie Google, MSN) haven’t adopted the same or a similar format for targeting sections of your web pages, therefore it would only be useful for pages indexed by Yahoo. All content on your web pages will still be indexed by the other search engines.
Resources
Danny Sullivan’s Article
http://searchengineland.com/070502-132315.php
Yahoo!’s help section
http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp/slurp-14.html
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