How can I tell Google not to index a portion of a webpage?
-
I'm working with an ecommerce site that has many product descriptions for various brands that are important to have but are all straight duplicates. I'm looking for some type of tag tht can be implemented to prevent Google from seeing these as duplicates while still allowing the page to rank in the index. I thought I had found it with Googleoff, googleon tag but it appears that this is only used with the google appliance hardware.
-
Correct you should make sure is not used elsewhere.
But I can't refrain from stressing again to hide the content is unlikely the best strategy.
-
So what should it look like in the code?
If my area to block was a product description it might say
"Product Description
bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla"
Secondly, in the robots.txt if I disallow /iframes/ then I would need to make sure we are not using iframes anywhere else?
-
Just as Chris Painter pointed out, you shouldn't worry too much about duplicate content if your site is legit (not an autoblog for example) and if you really want hide it from google, iframes are the way to go.
-
Matt Cutts has said (source:http://youtu.be/Vi-wkEeOKxM ) not to worry too much about duplicate content especially with the sheer volume of it there is on the internet. You may find you're looking more like you are trying to cheat Google or similar which could cause you a bigger head ache not to mention you may slow your webapge down, duplicate content isn't the worse enemy for seo. If you are worried put all the effort of trying to hide stuff from Google into making the product description unique.
-
Hello Brad,
Just to get your question clear.
I'm I correct that you want a method that does let Google (and other search engines) know a portion of your pages are duplicates while you want both duplicated pages and original pages to rank in the SERP's?
If you could provide us with an example (link) that would help a great deal as well.
-
Hi Brad,
You can prevent Google from seeing portions of the page by putting those portions in iframes that are blocked by
robots.txt.
Disallow: /iframes/
Thanks
-
You can iframe those chunks of content and block with robots.txt or just meta tagging noindex in the iframe source.
But I would not, if you can't build a plan to make the content unique just canonicalize, or let google choose which page to pick among the duplicate bunch.
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
-
Google indexing .com and .co.uk site
Hi, I am working on a site that is experiencing indexation problems: To give you an idea, the website should be www.example.com however, Google seems to index www.example.co.uk as well. It doesn’t seem to honour the 301 redirect that is on the co.uk site. This is causing quite a few reporting and tracking issues. This happened the first time in November 2016 and there was an issue identified in the DDOS protection which meant we would have to point www.example.co.uk to the same DNS as www.example.com. This was implemented and made no difference. I cleaned up the htaccess file and this made no difference either. In June 2017, Google finally indexed the correct URL, but I can’t be sure what changed it. I have now migrated the site onto https and www.example.co.uk has been reindexed in Google alongside www.example.com I have been advised that the http needs to be removed from DDOS which is in motion I have also redirected http://www.example.co.uk straight to https://www.example.com to prevent chain redirects I can’t block the site via robot.txt unless I take the redirects off which could mean that I lose my rankings. I should also mention that I haven't actually lost any rankings, it's just replaced some URLs with co.uk and others have remained the same. Could you please advise what further steps I should take to ensure the correct URL’s are indexed in Google?
Technical SEO | | Niki_10 -
Site indexed by Google, but (almost) never gets impressions
Hi there, I have a question that I wasn't able to give it a reasonable answer yet, so I'm going to trust on all of you. Basically a site has all its pages indexed by Google (I verified with site:sitename.com) and it also has great and unique content. All on-page grades are A with absolutely no negative factors at all. However its pages do not get impressions almost at all. Of course I didn't expect it to be on page 1 since it has been launched on Dec, 1st, but it looks like Google is ignoring (or giving it bad scores) for some reason. Only things that can contribute to that could be: domain privacy on the domain, redirect from the www to the subdomain we use (we did this because it will be a multi-language site, so we'll assign to each country a subdomain), recency (it has been put online on Dec 1st and the domain is just a couple of months old). Or maybe because we blocked crawlers for a few days before the launch? Exactly a few days before Dec 1st. What do you think? What could be the reason for that? Thanks guys!
Technical SEO | | ruggero0 -
How to Remove /feed URLs from Google's Index
Hey everyone, I have an issue with RSS /feed URLs being indexed by Google for some of our Wordpress sites. Have a look at this Google query, and click to show omitted search results. You'll see we have 500+ /feed URLs indexed by Google, for our many category pages/etc. Here is one of the example URLs: http://www.howdesign.com/design-creativity/fonts-typography/letterforms/attachment/gilhelveticatrade/feed/. Based on this content/code of the XML page, it looks like Wordpress is generating these: <generator>http://wordpress.org/?v=3.5.2</generator> Any idea how to get them out of Google's index without 301 redirecting them? We need the Wordpress-generated RSS feeds to work for various uses. My first two thoughts are trying to work with our Development team to see if we can get a "noindex" meta robots tag on the pages, by they are dynamically-generated pages...so I'm not sure if that will be possible. Or, perhaps we can add a "feed" paramater to GWT "URL Parameters" section...but I don't want to limit Google from crawling these again...I figure I need Google to crawl them and see some code that says to get the pages out of their index...and THEN not crawl the pages anymore. I don't think the "Remove URL" feature in GWT will work, since that tool only removes URLs from the search results, not the actual Google index. FWIW, this site is using the Yoast plugin. We set every page type to "noindex" except for the homepage, Posts, Pages and Categories. We have other sites on Yoast that do not have any /feed URLs indexed by Google at all. Side note, the /robots.txt file was previously blocking crawling of the /feed URLs on this site, which is why you'll see that note in the Google SERPs when you click on the query link given in the first paragraph.
Technical SEO | | M_D_Golden_Peak0 -
My beta site (beta.website.com) has been inadvertently indexed. Its cached pages are taking traffic away from our real website (website.com). Should I just "NO INDEX" the entire beta site and if so, what's the best way to do this? Please advise.
My beta site (beta.website.com) has been inadvertently indexed. Its cached pages are taking traffic away from our real website (website.com). Should I just "NO INDEX" the entire beta site and if so, what's the best way to do this? Are there any other precautions I should be taking? Please advise.
Technical SEO | | BVREID0 -
No existing pages in Google index
I have a real estate portal. I have a few categories - for example: flats, houses etc. Url of category looks like that: mydomain.com/flats/?page=1 Each category has about 30-40 pages - BUT in Google index I found url like: mydomain.com/flats/?page=1350 Can you explain it? This url contains just headline etc - but no content! (it´s just generated page by PHP) How is it possible, that Google can find and index these pages? (on the web, there are no backlinks on these pages) thanks
Technical SEO | | visibilitysk0 -
Google + button
Hi everyone, just noticed the default new red button go onto my website. Is there anyway to go back to the blue button or customise it? it doesn't really fit in with our colour sceheme 😞 Thanks, any info much appreciated as always.
Technical SEO | | pauledwards0 -
Removing a site from Google's index
We have a site we'd like to have pulled from Google's index. Back in late June, we disallowed robot access to the site through the robots.txt file and added a robots meta tag with "no index,no follow" commands. The expectation was that Google would eventually crawl the site and remove it from the index in response to those tags. The problem is that Google hasn't come back to crawl the site since late May. Is there a way to speed up this process and communicate to Google that we want the entire site out of the index, or do we just have to wait until it's eventually crawled again?
Technical SEO | | issuebasedmedia0 -
Dynamically-generated .PDF files, instead of normal pages, indexed by and ranking in Google
Hi, I come across a tough problem. I am working on an online-store website which contains the functionlaity of viewing products details in .PDF format (by the way, the website is built on Joomla CMS), now when I search my site's name in Google, the SERP simply displays my .PDF files in the first couple positions (shown in normal .PDF files format: [PDF]...)and I cannot find the normal pages there on SERP #1 unless I search the full site domain in Google. I really don't want this! Would you please tell me how to figure the problem out and solve it. I can actually remove the corresponding component (Virtuemart) that are in charge of generating the .PDF files. Now I am trying to redirect all the .PDF pages ranking in Google to a 404 page and remove the functionality, I plan to regenerate a sitemap of my site and submit it to Google, will it be working for me? I really appreciate that if you could help solve this problem. Thanks very much. Sincerely SEOmoz Pro Member
Technical SEO | | fugu0