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On my HTML5 website, my "aside" content often contains navigation links to engage the visitor to visit other pages. Such navigation links include the title of the page and sometimes a preview of the content. These links are ramdomly created and can change based upon the cache configuration.

How can I say search engines this content is not relevant for being referenced and that it shouldn't bother doing so? Is there an HTML attribute to specify that on an element?

For instance, I have a page called "Top Music 2011". If you search Google with the request : site:deadrooster.org "Top Music 2011" you'll find many results but only 1 -the first, luckily- is really pertinent. Other pages are retured because once in their lifetime, they contained a link to the "Top Music 2011" page but at the time the user is going to click the link, he can't be sure it's still the case. And I want to fix that.

Mick F
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  • Possible duplicate of http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1497445/is-there-a-way-to-prevent-googlebot-from-indexing-certain-parts-of-a-page – Dan Blows Feb 06 '12 at 14:31

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You can't. To quote from the horse's mouth:

How to tell Google not to [index part of a page]?

You don't! If it is content, If it is part of that page, then it Will be Crawled, and may be Indexed and Ranked

You cannot use a Meta-Tag, or a HTML tag to tell Google to ignore, discount, not use, refer or touch part of your content.

You can use JavaScript or frames, though this will have other side-effects. This link will give you more information: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=4790fe490de7a55e&hl=en.

Better to use semantic HTML and leave Google to do its thing.

Dan Blows
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  • I had found this other page: http://code.google.com/apis/searchappliance/documentation/46/admin_crawl/Preparing.html#pagepart : "By embedding googleon/googleoff tags with their flags in HTML documents, you can disable the indexing of a word or portion of a Web page", are they out of date? – Mick F Feb 23 '12 at 17:44
  • @DirtyHenry That's not Google as appears on google.com - it's an enterprise tool which provides a customised version of Google for people on your network. – Dan Blows Feb 23 '12 at 18:05
  • oh ok... Well I guess your answer deserves the best answer then. Is there a best practice to make post previews not being marked as duplicate content then? – Mick F Feb 24 '12 at 11:47
  • @DirtyHenry Sorry - what do you mean by post previews? – Dan Blows Feb 24 '12 at 12:01
  • For instance, a post preview can be the first n characters of a blog post. I want to be able to insert this on a side bar without this preview being marked as duplicate content and (in an ideal word) without this preview being indexed by google. – Mick F Feb 24 '12 at 13:35
  • Google is fairly intelligent about what's duplicate content for nefarious purposes, and what's just standard fare. It's a longer conversation than I can fit here, but make sure that your posts have canonical URLs and you'll be fine. You could use an ` – Dan Blows Feb 24 '12 at 13:42