Is there a way to make robots ignore certain text?

Question

I have my blog (you can see it if you want, from my profile), and it\'s fresh, as well as google robots parsing results are.

The results were alarming to me. Appare

Answer 1

Other than black-hat server-side methods, there is nothing you can do. You may want to look at why you have those words so often and remove some of them from the site.

It used to be that you could use JS to "hide" things from googlebot, but you can't now that it parses JS. ( http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4159807.htm )

Answer 2

There is a simple way to tell google to not index parts of your documents, that is using googleon and googleoff:

<p>This is normal (X)HTML content that will be indexed by Google.</p>

<!--googleoff: index-->

<p>This (X)HTML content will NOT be indexed by Google.</p>

<!--googleon: index-->

In this example, the second paragraph will not be indexed by Google. Notice the “index” parameter, which may be set to any of the following:

• index — content surrounded by “googleoff: index” will not be indexed by Google

  anchor — anchor text for any links within a “googleoff: anchor” area will not be associated with the target page

  snippet — content surrounded by “googleoff: snippet” will not be used to create snippets for search results

  all — content surrounded by “googleoff: all” are treated with all

source

Answer 3

Google ignores HTML tags which have data-nosnippet:

<p>This text can be included in a snippet <span data-nosnippet>and this part would not be shown</span>.</p>

Source: Special tags that Google understands - Inline directives

Answer 4

Firstly think about the issue. If Google think "RSS" is the main keyword that may suggest the rest of your content is a bit shallow and needs expanding. Perhaps this should be the focus of your attention.If the rest of your content is rich I wouldn't worry about the issue as a search engine should know what the page is about from title and headings. Just make sure RSS etc is not in a heading or bold or strong tag.

Secondly as you rightly mention, you probably don't want use images as they are not assessable to screen readers without alt text and if they have alt text or supporting text then you add the keyword back in. However aria live may help you get around this issue, but I'm not an expert on accessibility.

Options:

• Use JavaScript to write that bit of content (maybe ajax it in after load). Search engines like Google can execute JavaScript but I would guess it wont value any JS written content very highly.
• Re-word the content or remove duplicates of it, one prominent RSS feed link may be better than several smaller ones dotted around the page.

• Use the css content attribute with pseudo :before or :after to add your content. I'm not sure if bots will index words in content attributes in CSS and know that contents value in relation to each page but it seems unlikely. Putting words like RSS in the CSS basically says it's a style thing not an HTML thing, therefore even if engines to index it they wont add much/any value to it. For example, the HTML and CSS could be:

  <a href="/my-feed.rss" class="add-text"></a>
  
  .add-text:after { content:'View my RSS feed'; }
  

Note the above will not work in older versions of IE, so you may need some IE version comments if you care about that.

Answer 5

you have to manually detect the "Google Bot" from request's user agent and feed them little different content than you normally serve to your user.

Answer 6

"googleon" and "googleoff" are only supported by the Google Search Appliance (when you host your own search results, usually for your own internal website).

They are not supported by Google's web-search at all. So please refrain from doing that and I think that should not be marked as a correct answer as this might create ambiguity.

Now, to get Google to exclude part of a page, you will need to place that content in a separate file, such as excluded.html, and use an iframe to display that content in the host page.

The iframe tag grabs content from another file and inserts it into the host page. I think there is no other available method so far.