Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
How to stop google from indexing specific sections of a page?
-
I'm currently trying to find a way to stop googlebot from indexing specific areas of a page, long ago Yahoo search created this tag class=”robots-nocontent” and I'm trying to see if there is a similar manner for google or if they have adopted the same tag?
Any help would be much appreciated.
-
Unfortunately, there is no officially sanctioned method for blocking just a portion of a page from the index. As others have mentioned, there are tricks that might do it, but their effectiveness is inconsistent, and most of them will run the risk that Google could treat it as a red flag of some sort. More often, the results just end up being unpredictable (especially with JavaScript) and end up causing additional grief for your developers and visitors.
Most of the time, if you're dealing with substantial amounts of content you don't want indexed, I'd look for other solutions, such as grouping that content or making sure more of your content on any given page is unique. Unfortunately, that depends a lot on why you want it blocked, so it's hard to give a one-size-fits-all answer.
-
We have just had a similar conundrum and plumped for the iframe option, sticking robots.txt on the iframe's source
-
I don't know this to be a fact, but I would not be surprised that if you could hide specific content on a page from Google, it would not be the best trust signal and could have it's own downside.
-
Google is getting much better at reading javascript, however.
-
I'm going to avoid iframes but the javascript does sound the best option so far, thank you!
-
You might try Inserting your text into Javascript or maybe, inserting it into an Iframe.
-
ah ok looks like I still need to look into this further, if you do find anything I would love to hear how you can achieve it as I think it would be a useful technique to implement in some projects.
-
Ahhh unfortunately the googleon / off tags is only in conjunction with Google search appliance, if that's changed though it would be incredibly useful.
-
Here is the article where this was taken from - http://perishablepress.com/tell-google-to-not-index-certain-parts-of-your-page/
-
This is a good question and something I haven't looked into. From articles I've read I think this may be what you are searching for.
<code>This is normal (X)HTML content that will be indexed by Google. This (X)HTML content will NOT be indexed by Google.</code>
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Trying to find all internal links to a specific page (without index)
Hi guys -- Still waiting on Moz to index a page of mine. We launched a new site over two months ago. In the meantime, I really just need a list of internal links to a specific page because I want to change its URL. Does anybody know how to find that list (of internal links to 1 of my pages) without the Moz index? I appreciate the help!
Technical SEO | | marchexmarketingmcc1 -
Does a no-indexed parent page impact its child pages?
If I have a page* in WordPress that is set as private and is no-indexed with Yoast, will that negatively affect the visibility of other pages that are set as children of that first page? *The context is that I want to organize some of the pages on a business's WordPress site into silos/directories. For example, if the business was a home remodeling company, it'd be convenient to keep all the pages about bathrooms, kitchens, additions, basements, etc. bundled together under a "services" parent page (/services/kitchens/, /services/bathrooms/, etc.). The thing is that the child pages will all be directly accessible from the menus, so there doesn't need to be anything on the parent /services/ page itself. Another such parent page/directory/category might be used to keep different photo gallery pages together (/galleries/kitchen-photos/, /galleries/bathroom-photos/, etc.). So again, would it be safe for pages like /services/kitchens/ and /galleries/addition-photos/ if the /services/ and /galleries/ pages (but not /galleries/* or anything like that) are no-indexed? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | BrianAlpert781 -
My video sitemap is not being index by Google
Dear friends, I have a videos portal. I created a video sitemap.xml and submit in to GWT but after 20 days it has not been indexed. I have verified in bing webmaster as well. All videos are dynamically being fetched from server. My all static pages have been indexed but not videos. Please help me where am I doing the mistake. There are no separate pages for single videos. All the content is dynamically coming from server. Please help me. your answers will be more appreciated................. Thanks
Technical SEO | | docbeans0 -
Removed Subdomain Sites Still in Google Index
Hey guys, I've got kind of a strange situation going on and I can't seem to find it addressed anywhere. I have a site that at one point had several development sites set up at subdomains. Those sites have since launched on their own domains, but the subdomain sites are still showing up in the Google index. However, if you look at the cached version of pages on these non-existent subdomains, it lists the NEW url, not the dev one in the little blurb that says "This is Google's cached version of www.correcturl.com." Clearly Google recognizes that the content resides at the new location, so how come the old pages are still in the index? Attempting to visit one of them gives a "Server Not Found" error, so they are definitely gone. This is happening to a couple of sites, one that was launched over a year ago so it doesn't appear to be a "wait and see" solution. Any suggestions would be a huge help. Thanks!!
Technical SEO | | SarahLK0 -
Google stopped crawling my site. Everybody is stumped.
This has stumped the Wordpress staff and people in the Google Webmasters forum. We are in Google News (have been for years), and so new posts are crawled immediately. On Feb 17-18 Crawl Stats dropped 85%, and new posts were no longer indexed (not appearing on News or search). Data highlighter attempts return "This URL could not be found in Google's index." No manual actions by Google. No changes to the website; no custom CSS. No Site Errors or new URL errors. No sitemap problems (resubmitting didn't help). We're on wordpress.com, so no odd code. We can see the robot.txt file. Other search engines can see us, as can social media websites. Older posts still index, but loss of News is a big hit. Also, I think overall Google referrals are dropping. We can Fetch the URL for a new post, and many hours later it appears on Google and News, and we can then use Data Highlighter. It's now 6 days and no recovery. Everybody is stumped. Any ideas? I just joined, so this might be the wrong venue. If so, apologies.
Technical SEO | | Editor-FabiusMaximus_Website0 -
How to inform Google to remove 404 Pages of my website?
Hi, I want to remove more than 6,000 pages of my website because of bad keywords, I am going to drop all these pages and making them ‘404’ I want to know how can I inform google that these pages does not exists so please don’t send me traffic from those bad keywords? Also want to know can I use disavow tool of google website to exclude these 6,000 pages of my own website?
Technical SEO | | renukishor4 -
How to block text on a page to be indexed?
I would like to block the spider indexing a block of text inside a page , however I do not want to block the whole page with, for example , a noindex tag. I have tried already with a tag like this : chocolate pudding chocolate pudding However this is not working for my case, a travel related website. thanks in advance for your support. Best regards Gianluca
Technical SEO | | CharmingGuy0 -
WordPress - How to stop both http:// and https:// pages being indexed?
Just published a static page 2 days ago on WordPress site but noticed that Google has indexed both http:// and https:// url's. Usually I only get http:// indexed though. Could anyone please explain why this may have happened and how I can fix? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Clicksjim1