Google Mini excluding ASP.NET page fragments

You have configured your Google Mini, got it integrated with you site. What you find now is that your results are getting skewed by irrelevant content on your site. This is what I’ve just found.

Exclude unwanted page sections

The result set was upset by the “customers who bought this also bought…” and the site page header and footer. This turned out very simple to resolve. There is a HTML tag that can be used to stop parts of the page from getting indexed. The definition of these are found in this document, excluding Unwanted Text from the Index.
Here are the examples pulled from that documentation for brevity;

<A href=sharks_rugby.html>shark A> 
Come to the fair!
Come to the fair!

You surround the control or section of the page you do not want to participate in the results with one of the three HTML comment tags shown above. This will not affect the rendering of you page but does mean something to the Google search appliance.

Index: The words between the tags are ignored by Google, they are treated as if they don’t occur on the page at all.

anchor: text in the html anchor tag to another page will not cause that destination page to appear as a result due to the link on this page.

Snippet: the search result will not use the text between the tags in the auto generated snippet that is included in the results.

all: Turns on all the attributes. Text between the tags is not indexed, followed to another linked-to page, or used for a snippet.

To solve my problem googleoff was applied to;

  • “Customers who bought this bought” control reference
  • Product category breadcrumb on the product pages
  • master page header and footers

This has resulted in “contact us” not returning every page in the site any more, as it used to be linked from every page through the site master pages and made the snippets much more relevant from search results.

Resulting in much richer results. Caution should be applied to avoid excluding too much of your content from Google as you can’t predict what and why someone is searching on your site. Excluding too much content may hinder them finding what they require or prevent them ever getting what they need.

Check the documentation for other controls you have available to control the indexing of pages (the crawl).