I was interested to read this afternoon that Yahoo has introduced a new “nocontent” tag to help them understand which parts of a page contain the “meat” or actual content, and which are just there to help users navigate the site / provide more general information.

I have one particular site that is ranking very well in Google but very poorly in Yahoo, so I was eager to give it a try. I implemented the tag in both the header and footer, but was hesitant to “nocontent” the navigation menu even though Yahoo seems to recommend this in their post.

Yahoo has also mentioned that they’ll be updating their index tonight to allow this new tag to be incorporated in their algorithms, and suggest that some reshuffling is bound to take place. As mentioned above, I’ve already implemented the tag in a couple places, so I’m excited to see if there is any change in my Yahoo rankings for the site in question. I’ll post a follow up if I see any action :).

If you’d like to give it a try, here are the ‘instructions:’

Applying the “class=robots-nocontent” Attribute:
Listed below are several examples of how to apply this attribute for various uses and different syntax options:

<div class=”robots-nocontent”>This is the navigational menu of the site and is common on all pages. It contains many terms and keywords not related to this site</div>

<span class=”robots-nocontent”>This is the site header that is present on all pages of the site and is not related to any particular page</span>

<p class=”robots-nocontent”>This is a boilerplate legal disclaimer required on each page of the site</p>

<div class=”robots-nocontent”>This is a section where ads are displayed on the page. Words that show up in ads may be entirely unrelated to the page contents</div>

You can use the “class=robots-nocontent” attribute with all XHTML tags and thus have great flexibility on applying this to your site pages.