"nocontent" class use for Google Custom Search: SEO Ramifications?
-
Hi all,
Have a client that uses Google Custom Search tool which is crawling, indexing and returning millions of irrelevant results for keywords that are on every page of the site. IT/Web dev. team is considering adding a class attribute to prohibit Google Custom Search from indexing bolierplate content regions.
Here's the link to Google's custom search help page:
http://support.google.com/customsearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2364585
"...If your pages have regions containing boilerplate content that's not relevant to the main content of the page, you can identify it using the
nocontent
class attribute. When Google Custom Search sees this tag, we'll ignore any keywords it contains and won't take them into account when calculating ranking for your Custom Search engine. (We'll still follow and crawl any links contained in the text markednocontent
.)To use the
nocontent
class attribute, include the boilerplate content in a tag (for example,span
ordiv
) like this:Google Custom Search also notes:"Using
nocontent
won't impact your site's performance in Google Web Search, or our crawling of your site, in any way. We'll continue to follow any links in tagged content; we just won't use keywords to calculate ranking for your Custom Search engine."Just want to confirm if anyone can forsee any SEO implications the use of this div could create? Anyone have experience with this?Thank you! -
Hi happygirlftw (nice name!)
While I don't have any direct experience using the "nocontent" tag, I can't see any reason why it should hurt you. This seems to be exactly what it was designed for.
Adwords offers a similar type of tag for web publishers called section targeting. I've used it to great success and it doesn't have any effect on organic results.
Finally, I'd be curious as to why Google couldn't identify the boilerplate content of your site on it's own. Google custom search uses different algorithms than regular search, but in this day and age we encourage most webmasters to reduce their boilerplate content, so this might warrant a closer look.
Best of luck!
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 indexed "Lorem Ipsum" content on an unfinished website
Hi guys. So I recently created a new WordPress site and started developing the homepage. I completely forgot to disallow robots to prevent Google from indexing it and the homepage of my site got quickly indexed with all the Lorem ipsum and some plagiarized content from sites of my competitors. What do I do now? I’m afraid that this might spoil my SEO strategy and devalue my site in the eyes of Google from the very beginning. Should I ask Google to remove the homepage using the removal tool in Google Webmaster Tools and ask it to recrawl the page after adding the unique content? Thank you so much for your replies.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ibis150 -
Updating 2013 Site Built with Custom Theme, Modify Existing Theme, Create New Custom Theme, Or Use Child Theme?
Our website was designed in 2013 using a custom theme. Some of the plugins are built from scratch. Ranking in our industry is hyper competitive. We are seeking a better interface and also to improve ranking. I have read that custom themes use lighter code and can rank better. Does this apply to a custom theme from 2013? Will we have an SEO advantage using a custom theme? If so, will that advantage be significant? We are using a discontinued plugin called "Firestorm" to display real estate listings. That plugin has been customized. Can we use that plugin on a new "custom" theme? How about on a "child" theme? In terms of the cost of future maintenance, will a "custom" theme require much more intervention (manual installation of updates) moving forward? Which of the following options is best: 1. Adapt our existing custom theme
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
2. Create a new custom theme
3. Create a child theme Thanks,
Alan0 -
Are "Powered By..." type footer backlinks good or bad for SEO?
Hi guys, We're running a software company which is also selling WP themes amongst other things. We've heard recently that footer backlinks like "Powered by BigBangThemes" might do more harm than good. Some clients usually forget to change them - so we want to make sure we stop including them in case this is true. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andy.bigbangthemes0 -
Change of Address in Google Search Console
I have merged domains before and it went rather smoothly following the Moz Guide - https://moz.com/blog/save-your-website-with-redirects . I've got a new challenge ahead of me though in that a client is buying the blog subdirectory associated with another domain. So it's the blog only, not the complete domain therefore a change of address for a site section doesn't exist. I believe the course of action will be the same except we'll just skip the change of address step since the original owner wants to maintain the TLD. Part of the contract is that we'll get the content which will be ported over to our domain and he'll maintain the 301's as requested and into perpetuity. Our domain is not brand new and has some credible links. Anyone encounter a transition of a partial domain before? Thanks for your help/suggestions.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoaustin0 -
Can a "site split" cause a drastic organic search decline?
Let's say you have a client. They have two big, main product offerings. Come early April of this year, one of the product offerings decide to move their product offering over to a new domain. Let's also say you had maybe 12 million links in your inbound link portfolio for the original domain. And when this product offering that split opened their new domain, they 301 redirected half of those 12 million links (maybe even 3/4s) over to their new domain. So you're left with "half" a website. And while you still have millions of links; you lost millions as well. Would a ~25-50% drop in organic traffic be a reasonable effect? My money is on YES. Because all links to a domain help "rise" the page authority sea level of all URLs of the domain. So cutting off 50-75% of those links would drop that sea level a somewhat corresponding amount. We did get some 301 redirects that we felt were "ours" in place in late July... but that really accounted for 25% of the total amount of pages with inbound links they took originally. And those got in place almost 4 months after the fact. Curious what other people may think. LnEazzi.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ChristianMKG0 -
Homepage not showing up in Google even when searching exact title tag
why does my site not show up in Google even when you search exact homepage title tag or business name (Brand-It Web Design)? You can even search the exact title tag for my site and it does not show up. If you search site:branditwebdesign.com you will see that it is there. But just the homepage doesn't show up in search for anything else. We have probably tried everything in the world to get this working. Any suggestions?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Brand_It_Web_Design0 -
Change of URLs: "little by little" VS "all at once"
Hi guys, We're planning to change our URLs structure for our product pages (to make them more SEO friendly) and it's obviously something very sensitive regarding the 301 redirections that we have to take with... I'm having a doubt about Mister Google: if we slowly do that modification (area by area, to minimize the risk of problems in case of bad 301 redirection), would we lose rankings in the search engine? (I'm wondering if they might consider our website is not "coherent" -> not the same product page URLs structure for all the product pages during some time) Thanks for your kind opinion 😉
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kuantokusta0 -
Will blocking google and SE's from indexing images hurt SEO?
Hi, We have a bit of a problem where on a website we are managing, there are thousands of "Dynamically" re-sized images. These are stressing out the server as on any page there could be upto 100 dynamically re-sized images. Google alone is indexing 50,000 pages a day, so multiply that by the number of images and it is a huge drag on the server. I was wondering if it maybe an idea to blog Robots (in robots.txt) from indexing all the images in the image file, to reduce the server load until we have a proper fix in place. We don't get any real value from having our website images in "Google Images" so I am wondering if this could be a safe way of reducing server load? Are there any other potential SEO issues this could cause?? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | James770