Yahoo! “No Content” Tag Failing

Last month Yahoo! announced support for a “no content” tag so you could tag text that you wanted to display on the page, but not have Yahoo! index. Sounded like a great plan.

The problem is, Slurp indexed content it wasn’t supposed to a less less than a quarter of the sites we placed the code on.

Here is what the code looks like and how it is supposed to behave.

Applying the “class=robots-nocontent” Attribute:
Listed below are several examples of how to apply this attribute for various uses and different syntax options:

This is the navigational menu of the site and is common on all pages. It contains many terms and keywords not related to this site

This is the site header that is present on all pages of the site and is not related to any particular page

This is a boilerplate legal disclaimer required on each page of the site

This is a section where ads are displayed on the page. Words that show up in ads may be entirely unrelated to the page contents

You can use the “class=robots-nocontent” attribute with all XHTML tags and thus have great flexibility on applying this to your site pages.

Since this tag only works with Yahoo! and the typical site only gets about 5% referral traffic from the organic listings of Yahoo! my suggestion is to ignore this until Google picks it up or comes out with something similar. My guess is they will come out with something similar and it will work consistently.

You can read more on the No Content Tag straight from Yahoo.