» yahoo

Before I say too much else I just wanted to say that generally in most cases I think it unnecessary to be too specific when highlighting the failings and flaws of others. It’s too easy to point fingers and say, oh look at how crap so and so is, or look at how so and so are doing that. In most cases it’s simply not necessary, you can say the same thing without making an enemy for yourself.

Yahoo! annouced a new tag today, supposedly aimed at helping webmasters to section off aspects of their pages so that spiders don’t index content that is superfluous to the meat and gravy of the page. The ‘what a great way to flag seo’d pages’ factor aside, lets look at what they are saying with regard to usefulness and the webmaster.

The “robots-nocontent” tag is a useful tool for webmasters.

• It can improve our focus on the main content of your pages.
• It helps target your pages in search results by making sure the appropriate deep page in your site can surface for the right queries.
• It helps improve the abstracts for your pages in results by identifying unrelated text on the page and thus omitting it from consideration for the search result summaries.

Those bullet points are interesting. Lets have a look at them in reverse. Nope, not reverse order, but reverse logic. Lets see what can be determined by flipping the logic around.

Ross Dunn over at Stepforth Seo wrote an interesting piece discussing Y!’s revamped search marketing progam.

The idea once was, and um…still is by all accounts is that you pay to be included via extra spidering of your urls and based upon your ‘natural’ ranking, you then rank in the SERP’s.

Hmmn I find myself wondering. WHY?

Why did they even bother resurrecting this unworkable, accusatory minefield?

If you are ranking ok naturally, then why would you do this? Why would you pay to use this service?
If you are not ranking well ‘naturally’ then again, why would you do this? If paid inclusion gives you no ranking boost, then why do it?

Inspired by Joost de vaalk’s noodp plugin for wordpress and the recent Y! announcement, I decided to provide a NOYDIR plugin.

You can download it here. Unzip it, put it in your plugins folder, and activate it. It then adds the following line to the section of your theme:

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOYDIR">

For those who are wondering what this is for, you can check out the Y! searchblog.

<META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOYDIR”>
<META NAME=”Slurp” CONTENT=”NOYDIR”>

So there you have it. If you do not want them to use your directory title and description in their SERPs you can now opt out by inserting either of those tags.