Google On How To Block Parts Of Content On A Page

Aug 23, 2023 - 7:31 am 1 by

Google Robot Consuming Content

Google's Gary Illyes gave some maybe unsanctioned ways to block portions or part of your content on a specific page. So let's say you want a section or paragraph or two not to be seen by Google Search, Gary provided some ways to make sure search engines don't see it.

Keep in mind, Google has no true mechanism to block parts of pages for indexing, not even the the nosnippet tag. That being said, here are some, as some would call, "hacks," to do this.

Gary posted on LinkedIn, "Crawlers are just http clients like your browser that will download whatever bytes a server gives them. If the server doesn't give the bytes for a certain section, the crawler will have not crawled that section."

So what do you do?

(1) "Put that section in JavaScript that's disallowed for crawling," he wrote.

or

(2) "If you hate yourself enough (like me), hack your http server to conditionally skip returning certain bytes," he added.

He did add a disclaimer saying, "Note that most search engines don't particularly like this practice because historically it's been used for spamming the living hell out of the internet."

So be careful when doing this, although, you probably shouldn't do this at all.

Forum discussion at LinkedIn.

 

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