Yahoo’s “robots-nocontent” class tag
by Sapphire (May 24, 2007)
While Google goes gaga over no-follow and paid links, Yahoo is implementing a tool that sounds much more simple and effective to me. It’s the "robots-nocontent" class tag, which I’m currently trying out on two of my sites. I plugged it into my sidebars.
Does anyone have any ideas what I should make a note of, so we can tell if it makes any difference?
Anyway, the idea is NOT to keep robots from indexing or following anything. It’s just helping them tell what your content is, so that when they extract keywords in order to serve your pages up to relevant searches, they won’t be including all the junk that’s not content. This also gives you the ability to, say, class out a paragraph in the middle of a page that has keywords which happen to be misleading. It’s really just a tool for webmasters to help the search engines help us get relevant content to happy searchers. Which is what we’re supposed to be doing anyway.
It won’t mean much if Google and the others don’t adopt this standard. And who knows how well it works. But it’s an interesting idea.
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May 28th, 2007 at 3:01 pm
My personal opinion is that Yahoo did not think this through. Using a Class attribute to relay information to a robot is wrong — semantically and technically.While the microformat for “nofollow” is viable as a Webmaster/Blogger tool, there needs to be Standard without using classes, attributes and other confusing (oft misleading) forms of communication.My proposal is a natural progession into the Body of the Html — a <robots attr=”value”> tag. And instead of marking up what is not “content”, simply markup what is. ‘The’ content of the page normally starts with an <H1> tag and proceeds from there … does it not?
May 29th, 2007 at 10:33 am
That’s interesting. I definitely don’t know much about the technology behind this stuff - I just liked the idea of what the class was supposed to do.
However, your idea does sound more to the point. Much more.
So with these companies being able to staff anyone they want, I wonder why they’re coming up with ideas like no-follow and this robot class? Is there an advantage from their viewpoint, somewhere?
May 29th, 2007 at 12:37 pm
Nofollow, originally, was to combat Blog comment spam. Google came up with the idea. But now it has spread beyond comment spam. For instance, Wikipedia now has every external link on their site set up with Nofollow.
Yahoo wants to push this class tag and be a leader for it. Google is getting too much press for Nofollow, so they needed something to show too. And, as I mentioned, this was not well thought out.
Speaking of Nofollow, you should join us over at Bumpzee where we have a DoFollow community. 159 members and growing! Just being part of this community has really increased my readership.
May 29th, 2007 at 6:31 pm
Thanks for the tip (and all the info), Webstractions! I’ll look at that community later this evening!