"nocontent" class use for Google Custom Search: SEO Ramifications?

[MRM-McCANN]

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 marked nocontent.)

To use the nocontent class attribute, include the boilerplate content in a tag (for example, span or div) 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!

[Cyrus-Shepard]

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!