A couple of our sites use Atomz for site search, and they've suggested for us to wrap our navigation with <NOINDEX></NOINDEX> tags to prevent that part of the page from being indexed.
Now i know that this is not a true HTML element, which in turn will force XHTML compliance to fail, but my main concern is with search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN).
Does anyone have any knowledge of this NOINDEX tag or it's effect on Search Engines?
Thanks,
Matt
PS - here's a link to Atomz's FAQ about this tag: http://www.atomz.com/appli
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1) You are right that the <noindex></noindex> tag breaks the XHTML rules, but this may not be a problem for you. It *is* a problem for me, because my companies internal systems and processes are all XHTML compliant, so we dont use Atomz, remember you have the choice to "vote with your feet" and go elsewhere.
2) The tag will not cause you any problems with Google or any of the main bots. These systems ignore most tags and work with the raw text on the site only. You can learn more about robots in general on [http://www.robotstxt.org/
One thing that we meant to try with Atomz but didn't have time before we changed serach bots was to try the <noindex> within comments - it's unlikely to work depending how Atomz parses the page, but might be worth a try - let me know if it works.
<!-- <noindex> -->
<p>The text I want to hide<p>
<!-- </noindex> -->
i know i know... my personal sites are usually XHTML compiant, but i don't have complete control over the sites where i work. There's a lot of stuff that's created by other departments, stuff that's program generated, etc...
I've sent a request to atomz support about commenting out the <noindex> tag, guess i'll see what they think about that.
Perhpas I didn't make it clear - I have implemented this tag on a client website, there is no detrimental affect on Google or any of the other search engines.
Later (last September actually), we removed Atomz for a different solution because the <noindex> tag interfered with our internal systems - processes we use to generate and replicate thousands of lines of code in hundreds of files. Our only way around it was to put a dummy marker <div> in the file around non-indexed text blocks and search/replace these with <noindex> using grep&sed on a unix server. This just proved too difficult to maintain and debug when it went wrong.
Go for it - it wont affect your page ranking, and if you are worried, bounce an email of the Google team - they will confirm that <noindex> has no effect on your ranking.
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by: viperoPosted on 2006-03-15 at 13:55:50ID: 16199178
I think that <noindex> is a really proprietary tag of Atomz and it will be surely ignored by the other search engines.
You don't have to worry about that.
Search engines, usually, follow meta tags instructions or robots.txt's ones.