Hello listers, I know about excluding a complete page from Google search by using (meta name="robots" content="noindex") in the page's html header, but what I want to do is exclude only a block of text from a page or pages. Here's the problem -- perhaps hundreds of pages on a website might have, for example, "Text Copyright 2011 by John Doe". Therefore, "John Doe" gets indexed on each page although John Doe is never mentioned elsewhere on the page. So when someone googles "john doe", there is a mass of hits, perhaps none of which are actually useful. Is there any way of declaring ("indexing off") yadda yadda ("indexing on") Thanks, Charles Dobie, cdobie@superaje.com

I would like to provide another viewpoint of having the webmaster's name indexed, as in "Text Copyright 2011 by John Doe". We all know it can be a bit complicated to recite a freepages URL, especially over the phone. Using my school-alumni site as an example < http://freepages.school-alumni.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~florian/ > the conversation goes something like this to give the URL verbally: http colon backslash backslash freepages dot school hyphen alumni dot rootsweb dot ancestry dot com backslash tilda florian backslash I've found it much easier to rely on Google's indexing. I can just tell someone to go to Google and enter freepages+florian+a specific community... like freepages+florian+misc (where all my sites are listed). If I can't remember in which "community" I put something or if I'm just being lazy that day, I tell them they can google freepages+my full name to get to any of my pages, where they can then use the on-site search box. Besides this useful point, if you use a copyright meta tag, your name is probably indexed from there also. Also, today, almost any search for a name requires qualifiers -- like John Doe+genealogy. If you search just for a name on any search engine, you'll only find millions of hits, mostly from "living people search" type websites, or for social networking sites. Most genealogy searchers figure out they need to use search qualifiers to drill down and get better results. So, I wouldn't waste time trying to block a copyright name. Judy On Sun, Nov 13, 2011 at 3:58 PM, Charles Dobie <cdobie@superaje.com> wrote: > Hello listers, > > I know about excluding a complete page from Google search by using > (meta name="robots" content="noindex") in the page's html header, but > what I want to do is exclude only a block of text from a page or pages. > > Here's the problem -- perhaps hundreds of pages on a website might > have, for example, "Text Copyright 2011 by John Doe". Therefore, > "John Doe" gets indexed on each page although John Doe is never > mentioned elsewhere on the page. So when someone googles "john doe", > there is a mass of hits, perhaps none of which are actually useful. > > Is there any way of declaring ("indexing off") yadda yadda ("indexing on") > > Thanks, > > Charles Dobie, > cdobie@superaje.com > > >