Ever wanted to add rel="nofollow" to an entire div? Me too.
Say, for instance, you duplicated your navigation in your footer and you want to nofollow the links, instead of adding a rel="nofollow" attribute to every link, it would make much more sense to add it to the containing div. This wouldn’t hide content and prevent content from being indexed or anything crazy like that, but simply prevent following of links inside of 1 div.
Anybody in tight with Google and wanna suggest such a feature? Maybe Yahoo! would take us up on the offer now that they’re beginning their semantic search support.
Would there be any reason not to allow this?
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We actually have a similar issue where this would be very handy.
We run our site in many different languages, but we do have one page which is in English across all language sites. We keep this in English because it is user generated.
So is there a way where I can tell Google to ignore this section on the page? I do want the page to be indexed, but just not the one
Actually it sounds like you may be describing a different problem. What I was talking about what adding a rel=nofollow to all anchor tags within a specified DIV so bots wouldn’t follow the links. However, the content within that DIV would still be indexed.
It sounds like you’re worried about duplicate content and you’re wanting to prevent search engines from penalizing you. In this case, you don’t need to do anything at all. Google won’t penalize you unless your intent seems malicious: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66359
If you just want to prevent one page from being indexed, then use the following meta tag on that page: