How to stop google from indexing specific sections of a page?

[Iamfaramon]

I'm currently trying to find a way to stop googlebot from indexing specific areas of a page, long ago Yahoo search created this tag class=”robots-nocontent” and I'm trying to see if there is a similar manner for google or if they have adopted the same tag?

Any help would be much appreciated.

[chrissmithps]

This is a good question and something I haven't looked into. From articles I've read I think this may be what you are searching for.

 <code>This is normal (X)HTML content that will be indexed by Google.

This (X)HTML content will NOT be indexed by Google.</code> 

[chrissmithps]

Here is the article where this was taken from - http://perishablepress.com/tell-google-to-not-index-certain-parts-of-your-page/

[Iamfaramon]

Ahhh unfortunately the googleon / off  tags is only in conjunction with Google search appliance, if that's changed though it would be incredibly useful.

[chrissmithps]

ah ok looks like I still need to look into this further, if you do find anything I would love to hear how you can achieve it as I think it would be a useful technique to implement in some projects.

[Chris.Menke]

You might try Inserting your text into Javascript or maybe, inserting it into an Iframe.

[Iamfaramon]

I'm going to avoid iframes but the javascript does sound the best option so far, thank you!

[KeriMorgret]

Google is getting much better at reading javascript, however.

[94501]

I don't know this to be a fact, but I would not be surprised that if you could hide specific content on a page from Google, it would not be the best trust signal and could have it's own downside.

[tescokitchens]

We have just had a similar conundrum and plumped for the iframe option, sticking robots.txt on the iframe's source

[Dr-Pete]

Unfortunately, there is no officially sanctioned method for blocking just a portion of a page from the index. As others have mentioned, there are tricks that might do it, but their effectiveness is inconsistent, and most of them will run the risk that Google could treat it as a red flag of some sort. More often, the results just end up being unpredictable (especially with JavaScript) and end up causing additional grief for your developers and visitors.

Most of the time, if you're dealing with substantial amounts of content you don't want indexed, I'd look for other solutions, such as grouping that content or making sure more of your content on any given page is unique. Unfortunately, that depends a lot on why you want it blocked, so it's hard to give a one-size-fits-all answer.