Is there a method to instruct crawlers to overlook specific sections of a document?

Question

Is there a method to instruct crawlers to overlook specific sections of a document?

I understand that there are various methods to control the access of crawlers/spiders to documents such as robots.txt, meta tags, link attributes, etc.

However, in my particular case, I am looking to exclude only a specific portion of a document. This portion cannot be contained within an IFrame and is considered "normal" content. It would be great to have something similar to <noscript> blocks to indicate that certain content should not be indexed.

Initially, I considered using document.write() to output these parts, but it appears that my assumption that "spiders generally do not execute JavaScript" might be incorrect.
I thought about serving a different version of the page when detecting a crawler, but this method seems imprecise, doesn't it?
Additionally, I am unable to place this content within an image.

Are there any clever tricks to prevent a specific part of a document (not just scattered words) from being indexed?

[edit] While I could use a method like checking the user agent against a list of robots, I prefer to find a more universal approach. The section to be hidden contains dynamic content and whatever solution I implement must be compatible with "old" browsers like IE6 :\

javascript html seo web-crawler

Answer 1

Answer №1

The distinction between static content and dynamic content lies primarily in the file extension being used:

let extension = "html"; // switch to "php" for instance to display dynamic content
function loadContent(filename){
  let content=document.createElement('div');
  content.setAttribute("id","dynamic-content");
  content.setAttribute("src", filename);
  document.getElementsByTagName("body")[0].appendChild(content);
}
window.onload=function() {
  loadContent("examplecontent."+extension); // difficult for web crawlers to interpret
}

In examplecontent.html:

document.getElementById("content").innerHTML="This is a static element";

In examplecontent.php:

<?PHP 
  header("content-type:text/html");
  // retrieve data from database
  $data = .....;
  ?>
  document.getElementById("content").innerHTML="<? echo $data; ?>";

Answer 2

The distinction between static content and dynamic content lies primarily in the file extension being used:

let extension = "html"; // switch to "php" for instance to display dynamic content
function loadContent(filename){
  let content=document.createElement('div');
  content.setAttribute("id","dynamic-content");
  content.setAttribute("src", filename);
  document.getElementsByTagName("body")[0].appendChild(content);
}
window.onload=function() {
  loadContent("examplecontent."+extension); // difficult for web crawlers to interpret
}

In examplecontent.html:

document.getElementById("content").innerHTML="This is a static element";

In examplecontent.php:

<?PHP 
  header("content-type:text/html");
  // retrieve data from database
  $data = .....;
  ?>
  document.getElementById("content").innerHTML="<? echo $data; ?>";

Is there a method to instruct crawlers to overlook specific sections of a document?

Answer №1

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