Prevent Google from Indexing Portions of a Page

By Jason Sherrill
Posted on Feb 26, 2008

Today one of my clients asked whether it's possible to instruct Googlebot to ignore a portion of a web page when crawling and indexing his web site. This client shows product pricing on their web site, but would prefer that Google not index the prices so that they do not appear in search results. I was not aware of a directive that Googlebot would follow to ignore anything other than entire web sites, pages or folders, so I researched the topic and here's what I learned.

Yahoo supports the robot-nocontent tag, which allows you to instruct Yahoo's search robot to ignore portions of content on a web page. It works like this:

<p class="robots-nocontent">
Yahoo loves Google.
</p>

The "robots-nocontent" tag instructs Yahoo's search spider to ignore the content inside the <p> and </p> tags.

I've been unable to find evidence that any search robot other than Yahoo's supports this directive though. I also haven't found any similar directives that Google does support. So for now, it appears that the answer to my client's question is "No, you cannot hide specific content on a page from Google." Well, technically, we could do it, but since Google considers the method as cloaking, which is a search engine optimization no-no, I don't advise implementing these methods on a site where search rankings are important.

If anyone knows of a Google or Live alternative, please share.