<aside>Tag Use</aside>

[SEOBirmingham81]

Hi Guys,

Just after some clarification - I have recently been told that by placing content in

<aside></aside>

tags spiders will ignore the content. Is this the case? I always thought that content placed in these tags was to identify related content.

To put the query into some context, we have the same content on multiple pages on a site, which is relevant to the main body copy - but could throw up duplicate content issues...

Thanks in advance.

[StickyWebz]

I've never heard of Google not indexing content inside of an

<aside>tag. Where did you hear that from? The aside tags are to identify related content, as you suggested.</aside>

[SEOBirmingham81]

Thanks for your quick reply.

I was told this by the dev guy who built the site after I requested the offending content be displayed as an image (or some other way) because I was concerned about duplicate content issues across the site.

There isn't masses of it - just thought it could potentially cause a problem.

I've had this discussion many times and it occurs frequently across sites - what would you do with said content? It's about 300 words I guess...

[donford]

I have not seen any guidelines laid out. It is important to note that

<aside>tag is a HTML 5 element and as such highly likely every crawler will handle it differently. The purpose to the best of my understanding is to tell the crawlers this content is not exactly what my page is about, allowing for places on the site the owner can advertise or cross link similar but necessarily different content. Which if I understand it correctly gives every crawler / bot  the perfect way to weight the

<aside>tag differently in their algorithms.

Maybe Dr. Pete will run a test on Moz for us.

Here is a good little read on the aside tag: http://www.html-5-tutorial.com/aside-element.htm

</aside>

</aside>