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blocking repetitive text from a spider?

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  • blocking repetitive text from a spider?

    Oh lovely forum folks...

    I have a client who wants unified search functionality for three separate sites: her public web site (expanded brochure-ware), her WordPress blog, and a knowledge base (comprised of images, Word documents and PDF's). All three sites are hosted on completely different machines, but she wants her users to be able to search all three sites from the main, public web site.

    She wanted to look at alternatives to the Google appliances, and I thought Zoom Search was a nice option with good usability. However, she is upset about something (which is not unique to Zoom, just a fact of spidering):

    When Zoom spiders the blog, it (of course) reads all the page content. However, the blog features a substantial "category" list on every page. So the spider then indexes the category titles, which are (of course) major search key words for her product line. So searches on "Widget Type" turn in results for ALL the blog pages, because the term shows up on every page.

    Since I can't individually remove these category titles/key words from the search without rendering it useless (at least where the blog is concerned), is there some sort of workaround to blocking the spider from reading the Category list on the blog pages? Or any frequently repeated section on any web page?

    (I'm assuming that the same problem/issue would probably occur when we index her main site as well, which features sectional left navigation pieces, where the page titles are also major key words.)

    (And yes, I've tried to explain to her that this is how spidering works and that it's a consequence of all the web material being hosted on distributed machines, but she's being a little stubborn.)

    Any help or information on weighting in the Professional version (or a definitive answer that it kinda goes counter to your SEO strategy to not index certain key words) would be appreciated.

    Thanks

    Chas

  • #2
    See this FAQ.
    Q. How do I prevent parts of my webpage from being indexed (eg. exclude navigation menus, or page footers)?

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    • #3
      Thanks!

      Man, I thought I read every FAQ. Of course I missed that one. Excellent

      Thanks!

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