Lets Talk nocontent Tags

Most everyone has heard Yahoo introduced its support for nocontent tags in May. Below is what Yahoo says:

"Web pages often include headers, footers, navigational sections, repeated
boilerplate text, copyright notices, ad sections, or dynamic content that is
useful to users — but not to search engines. Webmasters can apply the
"robots-nocontent

" attribute to indicate to search engines any content that is
extraneous to the main unique content of the page. Yahoo! Search observes the
class="robots-nocontent" present on XHTML elements, such as div, span, and all
others.
When a "robots-nocontent" tag is used to mark a section of content
on a web page, Yahoo! will not use the terms contained in that section as
information for finding the page or for the abstract of that page in search
results. Note: Using a "robots-nocontent" tag to mark explicit sections of
content is not considered "cloaking" because all the content on the page is
available to us (unlike "cloaking" where we may be served content that is
different from what users see.)"My concern is this, how many times have you been pouring your heart into writing relevant content using your top keywords only to find you didn't have enough keywords or to much other text. The value in making pages designers deliver relevant content is in jeopardy. nocontent will give designers the ability to exempt ANY text from consideration concerning the page's relevance percentage. What do you think is going to happen here? ..... and if Google adopts it also?

I am all for great page rank and nice positioning, I just think one should earn it. Yahoo says that nocontent will bring a more targeted return on searches. I don't share that opinion, I believe webmasters will abuse it and Internet users will get 80% advertising and 10% relevant content. This will be just fine too because with most engines crawling exclusively now, they will never know! Seriously if they are so concerned about div tags then why don't they program the bots to ignore a regular list of tags, who cares its code...the bot doesn't need it.

Example, and I don't mean to judge..... But here is a blog already suggesting that commerce sites use this tag to "hide" their duplicate content from multiple sites so they aren't penalized! See what I mean?

"Whether it be Book Sellers or RV Dealers, when your inventory is duplicated
across multiple sites you are going to have problems. A way to deal with some of
this may be to use a Google version of the Yahoo nocontent tag and eliminate
much of the redundant text."

Many webmasters have worked very hard to build, develop, and promote their site honorably, only to have Yahoo issue a hall pass to the slackers. The big gossip now is will Google follow suit? Well I certainly hope not.

Peace & SEO

Baby

SEOCog.com