Using Google Code To Skip List Of Links

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Sitepoint Members,
My site has a left, right, and a middle column with content in the middle column and links to other pages on many different health subjects in the left and right columns. Is it always a good thing to use

<!–googleoff: …–>
.
.
.
.<!–googleon: …>

for things such as my left and right colums?

https://developers.google.com/search-appliance/documentation/46/admin_crawl/Preparing

Thanks,

Chris

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[font=verdana]I wouldn’t generally advise doing this. I’m a firm believer in giving Google free rein to wander all over your site, look at whatever it wants, stop and smell the roses, have a picnic on the grass etc, and then it will know best where to send people who come to it looking for directions. If you’re hiding chunks of your content from it then it won’t always have a full picture of your site.

I certainly wouldn’t recommend hiding your site navigation, because that will slow down the spidering and indexing of your site, because there will be fewer possible routes to each page.

I don’t like the idea of blocking outbound links (except for user-generated content), because if we go down that road and everybody blocks outbound links – whether with googleoff comments or rel=“nofollow” – the web collapses and Google won’t be able to continue spidering in the way that it does now.

There may be a rationale for telling Google to ignore certain parts of your page, but you’ve not mentioned anything there that leads me to believe that would be the case.[/font]

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I figured the text of the inbound links as a whole did not relate well to each individual page.

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I agree with Stevie D. There’s no reason not to give Google full access to the site. Those links and other items are vital to what Google does. And Google is only one of many search engines. If there are things you want Google to see, you probably should consider removing them from the site altogether.

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That’s a good point. I think the google white out method is good for plain text, but when I have to choose between too many internal links being seen by a search engine and too few, I’ll choose too many. Besiodes I read somewhere on google that you shouldn’t have links to all your pages on each page and then just yesterday I read on google that pages shouldn’t be burried too deep with folders inside of folders.

Thanks,

Chris

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