hide some links from search engines

[peterpann]

How can I hide some active links on a page from search engines, and let search engines index other links on the page

? Preferably not relying on Javascript.

 

[1DMF]

for the actual page use

<meta name="robots" content="noindex">

for a specific anchor use

 <a .. rel="nofollow">some link text</a>

using the rel attribute on the link.

Remember search engines do not index links, they index pages, so you need to set the page with the meta tag to tell them not to index the page.

you can also use the robots.txt directive to exclude pages from search engines.

However, it is up to the search engines whether they honour any of these settings.

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[mmerlinn]

However, it is up to the search engines whether they honour any of these settings.

My experience with my website is that Google generally honors the 'noindex' and 'nofollow' settings while Yahoo tends to ignore them. Have not checked other search engines to know what they do.

Therefore, you have two options:

1) Do not put sensitive information on any web page.
2) Obfuscate any information so that it does not get indexed properly.

I do both.


mmerlinn

http://mmerlinn.com

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[peterpann]

thanks