Early last month, Yahoo announced that they were introducing a Robots-Nocontent for Page Sections “microformat”. Simply put you can tell Yahoo! which parts of your page are unrelated to the main content on your page. For example, you might have a navigation bar on your page that has links to other parts of your site, but you don’t want the text of those links to be indexed with the content of your page. This does not mean that Yahoo! does not spider those links, it just means that they will not include that content in the index for the page.

The robots-nocontent is very easy to implement. Simply add a class attribute with the value set to robots-nocontent to a container element and that container won’t be indexed. For example:

<div class="robots-nocontent">Some content</div>


It will be interesting to see if other search engines pick up on this much like they did with Google’s introduction of rel=”nofollow”.  Search Engine Land also has some decent coverage on this topic as well.

Philipp Lenssen has a great idea he is calling Fading Out Nofollows.  Most blog software handles the comment spam problem by adding a rel=”nofollow” attribute to anchors in the comments section of your blog.  The idea here is that search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN will not follow these links during their spidering process and hence the spammer will not gain link juice from you.

The main drawback from this practice, is that it penalizes people who are posting legitimate comments on your blog.  Philipp’s idea is  a good one.  He suggests a middle  ground, where when a comment is first posted, it has the rel attribute by default.  Then after a specified period of time, the rel attribute is removed.  This gives the blogger some time to moderate the comments and delete the spam that happens to get through your filters (ie. Akismet).

In my opinion, I wonder how much the nofollow strategy is actually working.  I am getting more spam (over 1,000 comments/day) than ever.  About six months ago, I removed the rel=”nofollow” attribute altogether, and the amound of spam has remained consistant.

Wow! Did I miss hell freezing over? Microsoft, Google and Yahoo! - the three major search engines - have United to Support Sitemaps. This can be nothing but good for web developers and content creators. Sitemaps are simple XML files that help search engines determine how to spider your site and how often to do it. For more coverage of this news check out some of these links…

• Yahoo, Google and Microsoft join forces (really !!) behind Sitemaps
• Search Engines Unite On Unified Sitemaps System
• Google, Yahoo and Microsoft Agree to Standard Sitemaps Protocol
• Joint support for the Sitemap Protocol

Wink is a new breed of search engine and public bookmarking site that gives you the most relevant and interesting results as found by people! Wink uses Google powered search and applies Wink’s PeopleRank technology to deliver sites that people think are the best for your search. PeopleRank is a feature similar to Digg, where users of Wink can give each link a “Wink” to indicate that the site is good. Wink also makes extensive use of tagging to help find related links.

Links are dead - long live links! is a great article that suggests that the business of SEO is about to change away from incoming and outgoing links to a method that places more emphasis on Clickstreams. Google is going to great lengths to collect your clickstream by using products like Google Toolbar, Google Desktop, GMail and Google Reader. Add on the Google Analytics webmaster tool and you can quickly see that the search giant are beginning to collect alot of our click behaviours. This clickstream can then be used to determine how important a page or site actually is.

Searching for a fresher taste offers brilliant insight on the importance of Yahoo!s recent purchase of del.icio.us and it’s impact on the future of search and social networks.

Big announcement on the API/Web Services front today with Alexa completely opening it’s search API and providing access to its search data. The Alexa Web Search Platform is sure to be a mashup programmers heaven allowing users to search and process billions of documents and even create their own search engines using Alexa’s search and publication tools. The service isn’t totally free, but the cost appears to be very reasonable. The first 10,000 requests per month are free then after that, requests cost 15 cents per thousand.

Here is a list of links to the current pulse of the blogosphere on this topic:

• Announcing the Alexa Web Search Platform Beta
• Alexa (Make that Amazon) Looks to Change the Game
• TechCrunch » Alexa Totally Gets It, Opens Up API
• Alexa turned into web service - Amazon back to its innovative best
• Amazon’s Alexa Commoditizes Search

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you probably know that the Opera web browser is now completely and totally free. How was Opera able to move from a product whose development was supported by registration fees and ads to a product that is completely freeware? Om Malik suggests that Google Made Opera Browser Free by entering into a lucrative search placement deal with the search giant!

The web development weblog has three great tutorials that will show you how to create your own customized search page using SOAP from PHP. The tutorials cover:

• The Google Search API
• Yahoo Search API
• MSN Search API

Dave Winer (father of RSS) is suggesting that we should help make the Google API an open standard. Read his essay to find out why his explanation and solutions make perfect sense.