{"id":434,"date":"2005-02-21T02:18:41-05:00","date_gmt":"2005-02-21T07:18:41+00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peterjanes.ca\/blog\/archives\/2005\/02\/21\/google-off"},"modified":"2005-02-21T03:02:56-05:00","modified_gmt":"2005-02-21T08:02:56+00:00","slug":"google-off","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterjanes.ca\/blog\/2005\/02\/21\/google-off\/","title":{"rendered":"Google off"},"content":{"rendered":"

Google on! Google off! Google on, Google off… the Googler!<\/p>\r\n\r\n

But seriously.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

ckaminski<\/cite> of the Web Standards Project<\/a> recently highlighted<\/a> the redesign of AT&T’s home page<\/a> and developer Joe D’Andrea’s informative discussion of the project<\/a>. One thing D’Andrea doesn’t mention, however, is the presence of the two comment-style directives <!--googleoff: index--><\/code> and <!--googleon: index--><\/code>.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

Question answered: Those directives are not used by Google proper but rather our own slice-o-Google*, a mighty spiffy search appliance.<\/q> Thanks Joe! Wonder why this is only an option on the Google Appliance and isn’t turned on web-wide?<\/ins><\/p>\r\n\r\n

I’ve seen googleoff\/on<\/code> on the aforementioned AT&T site and on several CBC news items<\/a> (which also use the argument all<\/code>). It’s also visible on a number of disparate sites<\/a> because they have improperly-formatted comments; however, I believe this indicates that there are many more sites that use it properly.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

I wrote about the benefits of a content-level robot exclusion scheme<\/a> in August. googleoff\/on<\/code> is quite similar in concept, although it’s outside of the markup and thus requires a separate parser for XML-based content. (On the tag-soup web, though, it’s just another special case.) There’s also some comparison to be made to rel=\"nofollow\"<\/code><\/a>; it’s interesting to note that googleoff\/on: follow<\/code> could be used to accomplish exactly the same thing.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

Whether it works or not is another question. I’m inclined at the moment to say it doesn’t: a search for the CBC article above<\/a> including a term that is only present in the googleoff: index<\/code> or googleoff: all<\/code> blocks still finds the page, while a control request that includes a word not in the page at all<\/a> returns no hits.<\/del><\/p>\r\n\r\n

Still, it’s worth an experiment, so<\/del> In the hopes that this will someday make its way to the web at large,<\/ins> I’ve added the directives to the comment forms, navigation links, and other non-content sections of my weblog pages. Currently a search for occurrences of petroglyphs<\/cite> wordpress<\/cite> on this domain<\/a> returns only 3 results, and it’s my hope that that number won’t increase as Google respiders all the pages that now announce the presence of WordPress<\/a>.<\/del><\/p>\r\n\r\n

If by some chance the content exclusion works<\/del> is ever turned on<\/ins>, it might be interesting to try several other tests. The index<\/code> argument is a keyword from the robots meta tag<\/a>, so perhaps follow<\/code> would also work. (I’m presuming that all<\/code> takes the place of index,follow<\/code> and that the mere presence of googleoff<\/code> implies the no<\/code> prefix to those arguments.) Also, because the comments are external to the markup, it should be possible to nest or otherwise intertwine them.<\/p><\/div>

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