1

I am developing a CMS in PHP. I have a sidebar on most pages and also some other widgets. For example "read other articles" or a list of categories. Google does index that random-like content as part of the page.

In detail: I have a category for network stuff and a category for programming stuff. Sometimes on a page about networking there is a link in the sidebar to an article about programming. I want search engines, to follow those links but NOT index them as part of the page with the promary content about networking! For example I might write about LDAP but in the sidebar there is something about MBA. When I search Google looking for samba I might find that page.

When I use rel=nofollow, as far as I understand they will not follow those links at all.

So how can I define that some content is not to be indexed as part of a specific URL?

The only possible solution I found so far is

<!--BeginNoIndex-->
<!--EndNoIndex-->

It seems that this tells search engines not to associate content inside those tags with the main page content.

Stephen Ostermiller
  • 98,758
  • 18
  • 137
  • 361
user4438328
  • 11
  • 2
  • To confirm, you have source pages linking to the target page with the keyword of the target page, and the source is outranking the target for the keyword? – jrtapsell Jun 02 '18 at 22:08
  • yes but not only keywords, every content. when i search for samba i get a search result for the page about ldap. like in the screenshot imagine i search for samba and get directed to the page in the screenshot. but the samba article was just in the sidebar. the exact page is here https://simplepress.ml/?type=post&id=269. there is some random staff on the right side. this i want (not only the link - also the meaning of the word) not to get in relation with this page. but i want google to find the page abaut(ex samba) at its usual place in the category, so i think rel=nofollow is no solution. – user4438328 Jun 02 '18 at 22:14
  • Related: Preventing robots from crawling specific part of a page – Stephen Ostermiller Jun 09 '18 at 10:11
  • The BeginNoIndex and EndNoIndex are not supported by Google. Those are for a search engine called dtSearch by SiteCore. https://support.dtsearch.com/dts0185.htm Similarly Googlebot doesn't support GoogleOn and GoogleOff like some people think. – Stephen Ostermiller Jun 09 '18 at 10:14

1 Answers1

1

Indexing is not about pieces of content of a web page, but about the entire web page.

As the correct way to treat the issue, you need to wrap the content inside the sidebar in <aside></aside> HTML5 semantic tag which indicates the piece of content inside a web page which isn't directly related to the <main></main> content.

The main part of page needs to be wrapped inside <main> HTML tag. The main text of <main> content needs to be in a nested <article> tag. The related but not the main contents need to be wrapped in <aside> tag, nested in <main> tag, outside the <article> tag.

Shayan Davoodi
  • 443
  • 2
  • 9