Yahoo has introduced a new tag so that webmasters can emphasize irrelevant sections of there pages. All the major search engines utilize items such as robots.txt, no-follow links, and Google even allows you to emphasize various section of your page for the purpose of helping your adsense targeting. Well Yahoo now has robots-nocontent which allows you to de-emphasize the importance of part of your pages.
This should come in very handy when you want to cut out part of your page such as footers or links that you do not want counted as part of the ranking process. I get a decent amount of traffic from Yahoo on a couple of my sites so I’m going to implement this technique soon and see if it helps my Yahoo rankings. I’ll post back after I’ve had time to see a difference.
Basically it works just as a CSS element would you add class=â€robots-nocontent†in a div or span block around the text you want to de-emphasize. Only Yahoo will pay attention to this and its likely the other search engines will just ignore the tag all together. Hopefully as this is more widely adopted it will help clean up the indexes a little and provide for more relevant searches. Of course I’m sure there are ways to abuse this feature. I’ll let you figure out how it could help or hurt.
[tags]seo, yahoo rankings, search engine rankings[/tags]
