Circa 2008
Robots-Nocontent (2008)
According to this 2008 Yahoo! Page, it was at one time possible to hide content inside a page from spidering by Yahoo.
How do I mark web page content that is extraneous to the main unique content on the page? Web pages often include headers, footers, navigational sections, repeated boilerplate text, copyright notices, ad sections, or dynamic content that is useful to users — but not to search engines. Webmasters can apply the "robots-nocontent" attribute to indicate to search engines any content that is extraneous to the main unique content of the page. Yahoo! Search observes the class="robots-nocontent" present on XHTML elements, such as div, span, and all others. When a "robots-nocontent" tag is used to mark a section of content on a web page, Yahoo! will not use the terms contained in that section as information for finding the page or for the abstract of that page in search results. Note: Using a "robots-nocontent" tag to mark explicit sections of content is not considered "cloaking" because all the content on the page is available to us (unlike "cloaking" where we may be served content that is different from what users see.) The "robots-nocontent" tag is a useful tool for webmasters.
When you successfully target your page content, it can increase the likelihood that the user will find your page, find it relevant, click on your result, and convert. Applying the "class=robots-nocontent" Attribute:
- It can improve our focus on the main content of your pages.
- It helps target your pages in search results by making sure the appropriate deep page in your site can surface for the right queries.
- It 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.
Listed below are several examples of how to apply this attribute for various uses and different syntax options:This attribute offers webmasters a great deal of flexibility.You can use the "class=robots-nocontent" attribute with all XHTML tags.
<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>