A few days ago I came to recognize that email hiding technique I use won’t work anymore. However I still think it would be a great idea if I could remove a part of a page from search index, even if it won’t help me hide from spammers in the long run.

What I’d really like is to specify which parts of a page are not its content and can be safely ignored by search engines. Ignoring it would also mean absence of those parts from search indexes. Spiders could still follow links inside those parts, because I can still use robots.txt file if I really want to block their traversal. In effect, I’d like a more fine-grained approach to blocking, which doesn’t force the layout of my pages to even slightly favor spiders over people.

The way I imagine it would work is by simply applying a class name to the parts of the page I’d want shielded. I don’t care much (yet) if such class name would need to be specified in robots file or if it would be some name achieved by a web consensus. As far as I can see both approaches would work equally well.

The benefit of this would also be better search results. Every now and then I follow a search hit that fit my query because of a combination of site content and its navigation. Judging by my logs I’m not the only deceived soul. So, wouldn’t it be nice to be able to tell which parts are content and which aren’t?