The Index Summit session had a heavy focus on the new “nofollow” tag that allows a site owner to tell the search engines that a particular link …
… is not a “trusted” one (i.e. I’m linking to this site, but do not want it to appear as a vote for them). Matt Cutts of Google did a fine job of recapping the new standard and as this has been talked about by us and many others, I’ll save you from the recap.
I did want to highlight some of the information that came from Yahoo’s Tim Mayer. He had some proposals for additional tags that would expand on the principles of “nofollow”.
div class=”content-public”
The “content-public” tag would tell the search engines that the entire content within the tag is not promoted by the publisher. This expands on the “nofollow” tag, which merely relates to individual links, and allows publishers to designate whole areas of a web site that the search engine should ignore, such as the comments section of a blog.
div class=”content-nav”
A “content-nav” tag would be used to mark repeated navigation links to be excluded from content. It would allow web site publishers to designate areas that are constantly repeated and could be ignored, such as the navigation sections of a site.
div class=”content-default”
Conversely, “content-default” could be used to mark trusted content – e.g. moderator comments in a comments section of blog.
A show of hands by the audience demonstrated that most people would welcome Mayer’s suggestions. What do you think?
Andy Beal is an internet marketing consultant and considered one of the world’s most respected and interactive search engine marketing experts. Andy has worked with many Fortune 1000 companies such as Motorola, CitiFinancial, Lowes, Alaska Air, DeWALT, NBC and Experian.
You can read his internet marketing blog at Marketing Pilgrim and reach him at andy.beal@gmail.com.
