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In my WordPress blog, I have "Posted ? days ago" on every post. I have 10 posts on my homepage. So according to most keyword analysis tools, "days ago" is a top keyword on my blog, but I don't want it to be. How can I hide those words from search engines?

I don't want to use Javascript. I can easily use PHP and the $_SERVER variable, but I'm afraid I might get penalized for cloaking. Is there a HTML tag or an attribute like rel="nofollow" that I can use?

Balanivash
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Linksku
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  • It might help to inspect the HTML source of your blog. Can you provide a link? I just want to make sure you don't have those words in a `

    ` or something silly.

     – Chris Nielsen Jul 07 '11 at 02:14
  • I’m voting to close this question because it is about SEO (and is lacking a lot of necessary detail), which is an off-topic subject at Stack Overflow. – TylerH Oct 26 '20 at 15:18

6 Answers6

6

What I have found on wiki:

For Yandex:

<!--noindex-->Don't index this text.<!--/noindex-->

For Yahoo:

<div class="robots-nocontent">Don't index this text.</div>

For Google:

<!--googleoff: index--> Don't index this text.<!--googleon: index-->
garik
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    Important to know that the googleoff is specifically related to the Google Search Appliance, and not Google itself. See: http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/54735/can-you-use-googleon-and-googleoff-comments-to-prevent-googlebot-from-indexing-p – artlung Mar 26 '14 at 16:12
6

From Is there any way to have search engines not index a certain section of a page?

Supposedly you can add the class robots-nocontent to elements on your page, like this:

<div class="robots-nocontent">

    <p>Ignore this stuff.</p>

</div>

Yahoo respects this, though I don't know if other search engines respect this. It appears Google is not supporting this at this time. I suspect if you load your content via ajax you would get the same effect of it not being present on the page.

and

There's no general way to do that and personally I wouldn't bother with it. Search engines are pretty good at recognizing relevant content on a page, and even though that content might show up in the keywords that search engines have found, it doesn't mean that it would make the page relevant for those keywords.

If you have a page about "Fish" and a page about "Dogs" (that has the link to the page about "Fish" somewhere in the sidebar), search engines will generally be able to recognize that the page about "Fish" is much more relevant for "Fish" than the page about "Dogs" that mentions "Fish" in the sidebar. It's possible that both pages might be found at some point, but generally given that mostly one page from the site is shown in the search results, that's not something worth worrying about.

There's no need to be fancy with that, and search engines are likely to just get more confused if you try (eg if you use JavaScript to hide the content, you never know when search engines will start to find that content regardless). Similarly, using iframes with robots.txt disallows or AJAX will frequently degrade the quality of your pages to users (slow it down or make it less usable on a variety of devices), so unless there is a very, very strong & proven reason that you need to do this, I would strongly recommend not bothering with it.

John Conde
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1

I worked this out and posted it up at: http://www.scivillage.com/thread-2580.html

This should work, however more testing of it and feedback would be appreciated.

   .x:before{
      content:attr(title);
      display:inline;
   }
   
<ul>
  <li><a href="#"><span class="x" title="Homepage"></span></a></li>
  <li><a href="#"><span class="x" title="Contact" /></a></li>
</ul>

(I kept the class name short to reduce mark-up creep)

The search engines should ignore HTML tags with empty values when comes to looking for keywords, this should mean that it ignores what is written in the title attribute. (It assumes that the value is what's important, if it's empty then there is no point checking the attributes)

It was suggested that it's possible to negate having the closing tag in HTML5 due reduced strictness, however there is counter suggestions that end tags are still required.

I'd suggest not using it directly on a (anchor) tags since they can be used for sitemaps (using #), so it's means they would like have the Title spidered.

Although it is possible that it might assume any title content is there to inflate keywords through hidden elements, however I can not confirm this.

Stryderunknown
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1

To exclude specific text from Google search results you can add data-nosnippet attribute.

https://developers.google.com/search/reference/robots_meta_tag#data-nosnippet-attr

From google documentation

You can also prevent certain parts of the page text content from being shown in a snippet by using data-nosnippet.

Murali KG
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1

Linksku, I'm fairly sure you shouldn't be worried about that particular piece of text. Our algorithms do a relatively good job detecting boilerplate text. As far as I can tell from your question, this text is boilerplate and we likely already know that.

As for detecting Googlebot and don't serving this text for it, you're right, that would be cloaking and you should never do it. In this case if you hide that text from us, we will also have a hard time detecting it's boilerplate and you would end up doing exactly what you're trying to avoid :)

methode
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  • You are answering as if you are working for Google. We are using Std. as an Abbreviation for Stunden (this means Hours in German) and well ... its one of the top keywords of our site :( – Paul Weber Sep 29 '15 at 17:51
  • Top keyword where? Are you actually ranking for that with your site? – methode Sep 29 '15 at 20:15
  • There is an overview in the Google Web Master tools, and it has the most relevance there. Maybe Google does not filter it like other abbreviations, because it is also the abbreviation for sexually transmitted disease. We are currently trying to wrap it in an abbreviation tag with the full word as title and making it harder to parse with hidden spaces. I can give you a screenshot when I am back at my pc... – Paul Weber Sep 29 '15 at 22:22
  • If you're talking about the "keywords" feature, that's simply the bare bone view we get of the site. It's particularly useful for detecting hacks; fur example if you see the keyword "Viagra" in there but you shouldn't have that on your site, that's a good sign of having (or weird ugc). A better way to look at what keywords and phrases we see is the Search Analytics feature. That gives you a clear picture of how users reach your sure from search. – methode Sep 29 '15 at 22:42
0

HTML: 

<div class="hasHiddenText">_</div>

It is important that you leave a non-whitespace character between the element with a hidden text.

External CSS:

.hasHiddenText{
content: "Your hidden text here...";
/*This ovewrites the default content of the div but it isn't supported by all browsers.*/
}
.hasHiddenText::before{
content: " Your hidden text here...";
/*Places a hidden text above the div.*/
}

The "hidden text" pertains to content hidden to all search engines but visible to visitors.
You can also use nextline and all sorts of Unicode characters by escaping them with \uXXXX. To display linebreak characters correctly, be sure to add the 

white-space:pre-line;

property.

KHAYRI R.R. WOULFE
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